Neural network would be the most technically accurate given what they’ve announced so far.
There’s no information on if it’s a diffusion or transformer architecture. Though given DLSS 4.5 introduced a transformer for lighting, my guess would be that it’s the same thing just being more widely applied. But the technical details haven’t been released from anything I’ve seen, so for the time being it’s being described as “neural rendering” using an unspecified neural network.
Yes, the difference between hair in video game lighting and in actual chiaroscuro with the way light really works is going to be different.
Here’s a painting from over a hundred years ago. The subject doesn’t have brown roots, but is in shadow. And a comparison image of the exact same hair in different lighting conditions.
Performing complex lighting on individual hair strands is really expensive so in the base image you have a kind of diffuse lighting throughout the hair. With the DLSS 5 on, the distribution of light throughout the hair is variable leading to darker unlit strands underneath lit surface strands.
Literally the only thing DLSS 5 is changing, literally in the technical sense, is the lighting. It’s just that lighting can have dramatic results in how the eye perceives what’s lit.
And yes, the hair looks very different, but that’s how hair actually looks in mixed light and shadow (though a fair complaint with DLSS 5 is that it looks like it’s sliding the contrast unnaturally high).
It’s not an ‘LLM’ (large language model). 🤦
Eventually maybe, but I really doubt devs are going to build their entire game in an unfinished way for the less than 1% of their audience that is going to have one of the cards that can run this.
PS5, Xbox, and all PC gamers not dropping $1k on a new rig this fall are still going to be playing the games without this.
In 3 years, sure, maybe the PS6 has similar features on AMD by then and the market share for cards running real time ML adjustments to scenes has widened enough devs can depend on the tech.
But it’s a bit premature to throw a fit about the likelihood of devs cutting corners because of a feature only accessible to the most expensive setups owned by a fraction of their target audience.
Important details from a post-demo writeup:
During the demo, the DLSS research talked through the level of granularity available. Developers don’t just get an on/off switch. They get intensity controls that can be dialed anywhere, not just full strength. They get spatial masking, so they can set the water enhancement to 100%, wood to 30%, characters to 120%, all independently within the same scene. They get color grading controls for blending, contrast, saturation, and gamma. All of this runs through the existing SDK, which means studios already using DLSS and Reflex have a familiar pipeline to work with.
The demo showing the tech running at 100% is not going to look the same as full games built with it over the next year before release.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the only thing it’s changing is the lighting effects. The models aren’t changing at all (even when this looks hard to believe).
Yes, at full strength the effect at times looks pretty bad (anyone remember when devs could suddenly use bloom effects and entire games looked like Vaseline was smeared across the screen?). But it’s not going to be flipped on at 100% across the board for most games.
My guess looking at the demos so far is that a lot of material lighting like stone, metal, etc will have it at higher strengths and characters, particularly faces/skin, will have it considerably lower (the key place where it’s especially uncanny valley).
I wonder how much of this is related to the posturing from the new lead of Xbox about returning to exclusivity over there.
We were so close to one of the dumbest things in gaming for decades finally going away.
(Also, nothing Sony does from here on out will surprise me in its stupidity after they shuttered Bluepoint.)
If you haven’t done GTA 5, that’s the one you really need to get.
RDR2 is a very good game, but it’s a slower pace that’s not for everyone.
GTA 5 is a masterpiece for dicking around. I’ve spent entire evenings just stealing a waverunner and racing through the canals, or the scuba boat and scuba diving, or stealing a bike and biking up and down the mountain, or taking a helicopter up to interesting places and jumping out and parachuting.
In particular, you’re going to want to check out “Director’s Mode.”
This is a mode where you can toggle things like turning off police reactions or giving access to guns or having a super-jump that lets you fly through the air to the roofs of buildings with one leap.
You can really enjoy some of the finer details in this mode, like shooting up cars to see the deformation physics and how the tires get flat or the specific gas tank locations for different cars where they start leaking and shooting the gas trail to blow it up.
Infinite ammo for the mini gun is also quite worth it.
Teleporting around the map is extremely convenient too for things like getting back to the top of the mountain to bike down it over and over.
And oh man — controlling the weather and time of day, and being able to freeze the time of day to exactly when you want? Keeping it at nighttime and rain for an entire play session? Hit the golden hour with an overcast sky and keep it there? Makes a huge difference too.
(The only negative of Director’s Mode is you can’t explore stealth mechanics and certain types of special NPCs like the mime don’t show up.)
There’s so much detail to the world. Get into the military base and see if you can find where one of the landing strip lights is on the fritz because the drain next to it is overflowing. Or some of the graffiti in the tunnels underneath the city.
For your specific ask, I really can’t think of a better game in existence.
(I’ve also spent hundreds of hours messing around in Cyberpunk 2077, which is an outstanding game and open world, but not quite at the level of polish and variability as GTA 5.)
So weird this occurred not long after it’s become clear Xbox is getting out of the hardware game.
We assessed how endoscopists who regularly used AI performed colonoscopy when AI was not in use.
I wonder if mathematicians who never used a calculator are better at math than mathematicians who typically use a calculator but had it taken away for a study.
Or if grandmas who never got smartphones are better at remembering phone numbers than people with contacts saved in their phone.
Tip: your brain optimizes. So it reallocates resources away from things you can outsource. We already did this song and dance a decade ago with “is Google making people dumb” when it turned out people remembered how to search for a thing instead of the whole thing itself.
Live service doesn’t need to be shit.
There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.
But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.
In many cases yes (though I’ve been in good ones when playing off and on, usually the smaller the more there’s actual group activities).
But they are essential to be a part of for blueprints and trading, which are very core parts of the game.
You’ll almost always end up doing missions with other people other than when you intentionally want to do certain tasks solo.
A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.
PvP sucks and it’s almost all PvE content vs Destiny though.
Let there be this kind of light in these dark times.
The DLC is really the right balance for FromSoft.
The zones in the base game are slightly too big.
In the DLC, it’s still open world and extremely flexible in how you explore it, but there’s less wasted space.
It’s very tightly knit and the pacing is better as a result.
It’s like Elden Ring was watching masters of their craft cut their teeth on something new, and then the DLC was them applying everything they learned in that process.
Can’t wait for their next game in that same vein (especially not held back by last gen consoles).
I hate that the Smithscript weapons can’t be buffed.
Especially for the daggers.
Wanted to pew pew little bolts of lightning buffed daggers doing an additional 200+ damage per hit. 😢
No, it was awesome. Went to like 12 over the years. Early 2000s was peak E3.
Probably added after that update.
The new items stuff in particular seems like QoL considerations for “we just added a hundred items to the game for players coming back to it after months away.”
I’ve always thought Superman would be such an interesting game to do right.
A game where you are invincible and OP, but other people aren’t.
Where the weight of impossible decisions pulls you down into the depths of despair.
I think the tech is finally getting to a point where it’d be possible to fill a virtual city with people powered by AI that makes you really care about the individuals in the world. To form relationships and friendships that matter to you. For there to be dynamic characters that put a smile on your face when you see them in your world.
And then to watch many of them die as a result of your failures, as despite being an invincible god among men you can’t beat the impossible.
I really think the gameplay in a Superman game done right can be one of the darkest and most brutal games ever done, with dramatic tension just not typically seen in video games. The juxtaposition of having God mode turned on the entire game but it not mattering to your goals and motivations because it isn’t on for the NPCs would be unlike anything I’ve seen to date.
The level of detail in Helldivers 2 is insane for the type of game and company size.
Deformable terrain and buildings, enemy animations when you shoot off different limbs and they keep moving towards you, your cape burns off more and more as you use your jetpack, etc.
Call of Duty has 3,000 devs working on their titles.
Arrowhead has around 100 employees total.
I very much believe this game took that long with a team that size, and it shows and is a large part of why it’s been so successful.
That’s what he’s saying. That it doesn’t change the geometry or textures (still completely controlled by the devs) and that the parts that it does change are also tunable by the devs.
He’s responding to the backlash about how it changes models/textures (which it doesn’t) by saying those are still fully in the hands of the devs and the parts people are seeing in the demos can be fine tuned by the dev teams to match their vision for what they want it to do or not do (like change lighting on material surfaces and hair but not character faces as an example).