28 Likes
Credit goes to Pixaloo for Photoshopping the ârealisticâ Mario back in 2008:
And hereâs a Kotaku article about NVIDIA DLSS 5.
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I would not be surprised if somebody is already working on a mod like that 
5 Likes
It would be a pretty creepy mod. 
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That would be scarier than the original
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I actually think the Starfield ones may be an improvement. The other ones not so much.
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Taking something an artist made and changing it completely without their consent or input is never an improvement. Itâs disrespectful to artists and itâs sad that Nvidia thinks this is ok.
Say you invite me to your house for dinner. You spend hours carefully preparing food, tasting, adjusting, making it perfect. I show up with a sack full of random meals from local restaurants, throw that and your food in a blender, grind it into mush, and then declare it an âimprovementâ. Would you consider that an improvement?
16 Likes
I donât know, I think Starfield and FIFA (or whatever it was) examples just underline the fact that technology focus is on one of the least important problems in graphics right now.
Full animation range seems like a much more needed improvement, before we get into hyper-realism.
Single-player story-driven games can afford highly detailed characters with lots of geometry AND bones, but everything elseâŚ? Bethesdaâs dialog camera will not get better by adding wrinkles and random rim-lights to NPC. Nor inability of a character to lift arms above their head with natural-like shoulder deformation will magically solve itself. This filter just exaggerates these problems.
Iâd rather AI tech was used for getting better and more optimized lighting solutions (like those difficult tiny shadows in the eyes or hair line), but from the examples it seems to be used to re-generate visuals almost completely. Itâs not a mere âimprovementâ if it changes the original model this much.
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At least⌠you used âblenderâ⌠
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Bethesda is ok with it.
There is an interesting discussion to be made about game remasters in general. Original textures and models are replaced in games often many years after the original release. For many titles only remasters are available and original versions are slowly erased from existence.
When films are tampered with thereâs usually some push back. Although these days itâs hard to find copies of some movies with original vfx, like Star Wars or E.T. Star Trek original series had all the space ship shots completely redone (I think Blu Ray contained both versions).
Thatâs not what I asked. Let me reiterate. Say you invite me to your house for dinner. You spend hours carefully preparing food, tasting, adjusting, making it perfect. I show up with a sack full of random meals from local restaurants, throw that and your food in a blender, grind it into mush, and then declare it an âimprovementâ. Would you consider that an improvement?
Sadly a lot of âmoddersâ also do nothing else than âimprovingâ the textures by replacing them with some âthing betterâ⌠they may simply have some monster machine which the publisher does not want to targetâŚ
âŚbut of course some of those AI improvements⌠geraldine for exampleâŚ
âŚor this corpse like monster to âbeautifullâ woman 
âŚwell⌠maybe thatâs what 13 year boys as the main target clientel wants !? IDK 
Or at least someone in Bethesda is okay with that. Doesnât mean the actual developers of actual titles are thoughâŚ
I would argue that remasters/remake/redux versions should be considered a âfanartâ of sorts, unless they made by literally the same people and even then it would be a different iteration. Either way itâs a distinct transformative work and doesnât replace the original.
Thing about fanart - it usually has real artistic intent behind it (not counting âletâs just AI-upscale texturesâ or its brother âletâs just add raytracingâ)
5 Likes
Iâm not super enthusiastic about this tech. In most of the examples it looks cheap, despite using a lot of computing power.
Games are made sometimes by dozens of artists that come and go. I guess âgame directorâ or âart directorâ are responsible for the âvisionâ, but even those can sometimes change.
These days there are no longer physical releases, so when game is updated, the original is replaced.
Anyway those AI faces suck. You could make it more subtle, but then how you justify the need of a high end expensive card. The filter needs to be flashy.
There was also presentation of AI scene relighting.
It creates an effect that reminds me of âHDRâ photos with multiple expositions stacked together that were especially popular like a decade ago.
1 Like
Your inability to answer a simple yes/no question speaks vastly more about your position on this technology than anything youâve said ever could
Ask the question without relying on some confusing culinary metaphors.