This feels like its establishing a precedent for widespread adoption/implementation of AI into consumer devices. Manufactured consent.
“We compute one pixel… we hallucinate, if you will, the other 32.”
Between this and things like Sora, we are doomed to drown in illusions of our own creation.
If the visuals are performant and consistent, why do we care? I have always been baffled by the obsession with “real pixels” in some benchmarks and user commentary.
AI upscales are so immediately obvious and look like shit. Frame “generation” too. Not sour grapes, my card supports FSR and fluid motion frames, I just hate them and they are turned off.
That’s fine, but definitely not a widespread stance. Like somebody pointed out above, most players are willing to lose some visual clarity for the sake of performance.
Look, I don’t like the look of post-process AA at all. FXAA just seemed like a blur filter to me. But there was a whole generation of games out there where it was that or somehow finding enough performance to supersample a game and then endure the spotty compatibility of having to mess with custom unsupported resolutions and whatnot. It could definitely be done, particularly in older games, but for a mass market use case people would turn on SMAA or FXAA and be happy they didn’t have to deal with endless jaggies on their mid-tier hardware.
This is the same thing, it’s a remarkably small visual hit for a lot more performance, and particularly on higher resolution displays a lot of people are going to find it makes a lot of sense. Getting hung up on analyzing just “raw” performance as opposed of weighing the final results independently of the method used to get there makes no sense. Well, it makes no sense industry-wide, if you happen to prefer other ways to claw back that performance you’re more than welcome to deal with bilinear upscaling, lower in-game settings or whatever you think your sweet spot it, at least on PC.
