You may not like them, but AI upscalers are currently saving PC gaming

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dankielab@reddit

I have a 3080 12gb and never use it and it's not saving shit because most people don't use it only low end users use it and it's only good for high fps games that means the graphics resolution sucks anyway.

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LeoNatan@reddit

DLSS is not AI. Neither is LLM. There is no intelligence going around, improving image quality.

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Ambitious_Air5776@reddit

Upscaling/framegen are very much 'win more' kinds of effects where they work best if they already have high resolution or framerate to work with, so the upscalers don't have to 'guess' as much (to heavily oversimplify...). But regardless, I don't understand how people can tolerate any meaningful amount of upscaling - even if you can't easily pick out individual mistakes (beyond really obvious gnarly crap like chain fences etc), the overall slight degradation you get from heavy upscaling is pretty awful. Maybe that's just me as a person prone to migraines? On the other hand, if you're already working with quite good frame rates, framegen is actually great - playing something at 75\~100fps and pushing it to max out the 144hz monitor really does *feel* like free performance. Doesn't work well at low FPS though...my MHWilds still looks like garbage going from 35→70 because the genned frames are often so jacked up. Cranking upscaling to take that to 50→100 is even worse. With that in mind, saying *"...gamers wouldn't be able to play their favorite games with the fidelity they expect"* is kind of a hard to not scoff at.

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bubblesort33@reddit

Not entirely wrong. Even if the 1080ti was still well supported today, I'd rather take an RTX 3060 or 8GB RTX 5050 over it.

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ComfortableTomato807@reddit

In my opinion, he is more wrong than right because he completely overlooks the second major factor of these new anti-aliasing techniques, which is the superior image quality they provide. Standard TAA and other existing AA methods look like garbage in most AAA titles when compared to DLSS and FSR4, particularly in scenes with fine details like grass and trees. If you take away DLSS and FSR4 you can either get a blurry image or a shimmering "serrated" sharpened mess in most of modern AAA games.

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Strazdas1@reddit

considering that most popular PC gaming titles do not support upscalers, i find that hard to believe.

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Qsand0@reddit

Name one popular title released in 2025 that didn't have upscaling

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TwilightOmen@reddit

May I ask why you restrict it to only 2025 games? Popularity should include all games, not just recent games, shouldn't it?

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Qsand0@reddit

He said 'considering most popular games don't have it' which is very disingenuous. Not all older games would have upscaling obviously, given the tech wasn't all that great ab initio and it does take time for new technologies to become ubiquitous. With the excellent state of upscaling rn, there's no mainstream AAA title that will release without it. It's not possible.

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TwilightOmen@reddit

> He said 'considering most popular games don't have it' which is disingenuous But... Is it? Really? I again have to ask, why are we restricting popularity to only recent games? Let's take a little look at twitch streams, for example. How many of those are fitting in your 2024+ category? Around a quarter of the top 25? And as I mentioned in another post, looking at steam hardware survey and others, we have evidence that most people are playing at 1080p, and a very large amount of played and owned games are older titles. Could I ask you to explain how it is disingenuous? Doesn't all evidence seem to support the claim that other user made?

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zghr@reddit

Forkwind Magical balls 3 Vroom racing: Acceleration... Should I continue??

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Qsand0@reddit

I dont know any of those games wtf 🤣🤣 There's nothing to continue to. None of those titles are popular lmao

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Strazdas1@reddit

Most popular PC gaming titles werent released in 2025. Out of top 10 most played games on steam (which wont really be a top 10 because it does not count own-launcher MMOs) only 2 launched with upscaling options. 2 more have added them at a later patches. Note: i am ignoring Bongo Cat and Wallpaper Engine in the list because they arent games, but widgets that are classified as games on steam.

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iDontSeedMyTorrents@reddit

Gamers: "Devs are lazy when they should be optimizing!" The devs: />perform infinite DLC checks that give a 20% performance penalty />fail to notice problem after multiple "optimization" patches />users fix problem for devs This has been the state of gaming for ages now. Game companies are not willing to spend the time, money, or effort to fix these problems. They are rushing to push product out and move on to the next round of layoffs. Skilled programmers are not wasting their time slaving away at these companies pulling double shifts every day, no weekends, for shit pay and no job security. Rapid hardware improvements used to make this a mostly non-issue. Well guess what? That pace of hardware advancement is in the past. As with just about every other aspect of rasterization before it, upscaling is one more trick to improve performance. What's more, it's extremely powerful, produces fantastic results, allows for actually better image quality and raytracing, and enables for drastically more performance scaling than adding more raster cores alone.

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Strazdas1@reddit

Mods that fix performance has been a thing for like 15 years. Even back when most DLC was just expansion packs.

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kasakka1@reddit

I feel like they have become far more prominent, especially with Unreal Engine 5 games. I started Silent Hill F the other day. After giving it a spin, I went to download mods for: - Fixing HDR color grading. - Unreal Engine.ini tweaks to try to reduce stutter issues (they still occur at times) and boost performance. Noticed no visual difference, but it did ran a bit better. - Make the gameplay combat feel better. I have a 4090, the second faster GPU on the market at the time of writing. Yet this sort of thing still seems relevant to make a very new game perform acceptably. I feel like game developers these days do the bare minimum optimization to get things running at 30-ish fps on consoles and call it a day, let the PC gamers brute force it if they can.

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Strazdas1@reddit

They have become more prominent in a sense that modding in general became more prominent and easier to access. Most games will now have a supported mod installer, or 10 competing ones. Back then modding a performance mod may involve using a third party packpage manager to unpack files, modify them manually/replace them and then repackpage so the game does not know anything changed. >I have a 4090, the second faster GPU on the market at the time of writing. Yet this sort of thing still seems relevant to make a very new game perform acceptably. I think what is performing acceptably will be very individual. Back when i was poor i was playing games at 15 FPS and enjoying them because thats the best performance i could afford. It was acceptable to me. When i was a kid it was acceptable to play a slideshow Heroes of Might and Magic 3 on a Pentium 1 (less than a third of minimum requirements) because hotseat with a friend was "the best thing" no matter the games performance. It sounds like you simply have a lot higher bar for acceptable than most people. >I feel like game developers these days do the bare minimum optimization to get things running at 30-ish fps on consoles and call it a day, let the PC gamers brute force it if they can. If anything the modern trend is now to support 60 FPS on consoles while for a long time (more than a decade) most games didnt even do 30.

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kasakka1@reddit

> I think what is performing acceptably will be very individual. Back when i was poor i was playing games at 15 FPS and enjoying them because thats the best performance i could afford. It was acceptable to me. When i was a kid it was acceptable to play a slideshow Heroes of Might and Magic 3 on a Pentium 1 (less than a third of minimum requirements) because hotseat with a friend was "the best thing" no matter the games performance. It sounds like you simply have a lot higher bar for acceptable than most people. This reminded me that back in the day I had to run Doom in a window the size of a small postcard because it was the only way it ran at a reasonable framerate (probably 15-20) on a 286. For me modern games on the second fastest GPU on the market should run at above 60 fps, yet many dip under that. Hell, fully pathtraced Cyberpunk with DLSS can sometimes outperform modern UE5 games that don't look half as good. > If anything the modern trend is now to support 60 FPS on consoles while for a long time (more than a decade) most games didnt even do 30. The 40 fps mode they added as an in-betweener has been my go-to on the PS5. The 60 fps mode usually ends up blurry or severely sacrifices details and the 40 fps is good enough. I wish this wasn't the case because 60 fps with high visual fidelity should be achievable even with console hardware. It's a weird situation when the modern Doom games are this massive outlier that outperforms almost everything else in framerate *and* visuals just because the devs are experts at making use of their engine for the type of game they make.

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Blueberryburntpie@reddit

Gearbox CEO told players to refund their games instead of complaining about the performance issues: https://www.ign.com/articles/my-advice-to-users-is-to-accept-reality-and-tune-or-to-not-play-randy-pitchford-is-at-the-get-a-refund-from-steam-stage-of-the-borderlands-4-pc-performance-backlash > “I'm not trying to argue either,” Pitchford said in one of his tweet responses. “I was offering to help you if you are not satisfied with your experience and want some help making trade offs. I'm trying to help users understand that the software is the software and there are options available right now for people who want to play right now to make significant and dramatic trade offs between fps, resolution, and graphics features. > “That's for people who want to play now. People who want to play later can play later. People can even get a refund after buying and trying if they are not satisfied. Those are the options. My advice to users is to accept reality and tune, or to not play. > “We are working more on the software, but the software will not radically change later. However, hardware will get better (just like some or all of your hardware probably didn't exist when Cyberpunk first launched). Do you feel you need help to achieve the trade-offs you're looking for? What kind of hardware are you using and what resolution are you trying to run at and what frame rate is acceptable to you?”

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moofunk@reddit

What bugs me a little about this is that game engines really shouldn't cause such problems and therefore the problems shouldn't be that of the game developers. If a game is unoptimized, then it's the game engine's fault, unless you're really using it wrong. UE5 shouldn't be such a dog on modern hardware. > show us how it’s done, please Well, you start with understanding, that you're developing a game engine. If you don't start with that, then turning your 3D world machine into a game engine is going to be a very tough ordeal.

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bubblesort33@reddit

It's apparently pretty hard to use UE5 right. There is very few well coded UE5 games, and even Fortnite has. Epic wasn't wrong when they said developers aren't using it right to some degree. There probably are detrimental mistakes you can make to tank performance. But if they (Epic) can't figure it out in their own game, something is clearly wrong.

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Strazdas1@reddit

UE5 was built with CGI in mind. It had to be capable of doing hollywood CGI (and has been used to do this btw). This tends to be quite resource intensive and requires skills most game developers arent familiar with.

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Strazdas1@reddit

UE5 is capable engine if you know how to use it. But many developers are just not that great at coding.

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Sopel97@reddit

> Gearbox CEO told players to refund their games instead of complaining about the performance issues he's correct

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iDontSeedMyTorrents@reddit

Goes to show just how little the people in charge actually care. Optimization is not what makes them money.

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RumbleTheCassette@reddit

Without those features, developers would likely have developed games that catered more to lower specs, imo. Chicken vs egg situation here.

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Die4Ever@reddit

IDK PS4 Pro devs were already relying heavily on checkerboard rendering. Without AI upscaling we'd just be stuck with dumber upscaling

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opelit@reddit

If not AI, the GPUs would have more cores, the AI things take transistors that could be used as pure raw performance, Nvidia even has a separate RT part for it, and it takes more than 20% space of each SM. The RT part is not even used in games that have no RT, so waste of transistors.

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f3n2x@reddit

You just have to compare a 2080 to a 1080Ti today to realize how utterly ridiculous that argument is. 2080 went from being like 10% slower to like 300% faster with better image quality in games with DLSS support when you properly utilize the feature.

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opelit@reddit

it is 50% bigger chip to be around the same performance. AI generated frames should not be counted as 300% more frames. Cuz they add glitches, noise, and input lag (that they solved by removing frame buffer, so your games stutter)

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Aragil@reddit

Develops are not working for free. They are paid (and being told what to prioritize) by the companies. Companies have limited budgets and a huge list of priorities to tackle, and the optimization will be at the end of the list if the game is playable on a specific set of the platforms. So no, without the upscalers, the would not magically improve, it would be worse, and the other aspects of games would suffer as well.

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OhhhYaaa@reddit

Without the upscalers, it would be much higher on the list of priorities, because poor performance can absolutely destroy a release, and they wouldn't have that crutch to rely on. Yes, some companies would still release badly optimized games, like they did before upscalers, but no, that doesn't mean companies wouldn't have to pay more attention to how their games are running.

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zghr@reddit

But if they focused on optimization, who would focus on loot boxes??

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iDontSeedMyTorrents@reddit

Gamers: "Devs are lazy when they should be optimizing!" The devs: >perform infinite DLC checks that give a 20% performance penalty >fail to notice problem after multiple "optimization" patches >users fix problem for devs This has been the state of gaming for ages now. Game companies are not willing to spend the time, money, or effort to fix these problems. They are rushing to push product out and move on to the next round of layoffs. Skilled programmers are not wasting their time slaving away at these companies pulling double shifts every day, no weekends, for shit pay and no job security. Rapid hardware improvements used to make this a mostly non-issue. Well guess what? That pace of hardware advancement is in the past. As with just about every other aspect of rasterization before it, upscaling is one more trick to improve performance. What's more, it's extremely powerful, produces fantastic results, allows for actually better image quality and raytracing, and enables for drastically more performance scaling than adding more raster cores alone.

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ryanvsrobots@reddit

Could say the same thing about releasing new GPUs

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127-0-0-1_1@reddit

I mean, you could say the same of just GPU performance improvements in general.

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OddKSM@reddit

And without AI datacentres hoarding all the hardware, there'd be less of a need to make compromises with regards to upscaling. I'm with you, game devs used to make amazingly fun games on restricted hardware, there is no need for graphics to be photorealistic. In fact, if I could have less UE5 games with the same boring look and have games with actual art direction instead I'd be quite the happy camper.

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webjunk1e@reddit

Bullshit. No developer has made a PC port assuming upscaling. We have had a couple of scenarios where a game used upscaling and/or frame gen as a crutch for their poor performance (MH:W, BL4), but the game performance was trash from the ground up. The fact that upscaling exists isn't what made performance bad: bad development did.

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X_m7@reddit

Forgot about Remnant 2 already I see, the devs flat out said they designed that game with upscaling in mind: https://www.pcgamer.com/remnant-2s-upscaling-settings-are-more-necessity-than-nicety-and-players-arent-happy-about-it/

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

Upscaling been around for ages Numerous screen space and volumetric effects were already using sub-native resolutions

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2FastHaste@reddit

Not a chance.

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X_m7@reddit

Exactly, or at least make sure the top hardware can do say 4k120 meaning lower end hardware should be able to do 1080p60 easily with no need for upscaling or frame gen. Meanwhile what we end up with is top hardware doing like 1440p60 stretched to 4k120 so the lower end hardware end up with 720p30 stretched to 1080p60 instead. Not like the new graphics effects is that much more impressive compared to the old stuff anyway, especially relative to the performance cost, and now the new effects are so minor you'd only see them when standing still and staring at the reflection in the puddle or whatever anyway instead of, you know, playing the game. Or even if the new graphics effects looks noticeable they get blurred to hell by the upscalers anyway so what even is the point anymore, like I won't notice the shadows being more accurate if I'm running around but I sure as hell do notice if everything is a blurry mess all the damn time.

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KekeBl@reddit

That title is definitely going to be unpopular. But I have to say over the last few years I've noticed a LOT of online posts and comments singing a tune similar to "thank god I have FSR/DLSS so I don't have to upgrade yet." It'd be hard to get people to ungrudgingly admit it, but modern upscaling tech does indeed extend the lifespan or resolution reach of GPUs.

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ThinVast@reddit

Upscaling is an overall good, but some people only focus on the bad experiences and keep bringing up the same game like monster hunter wilds for being poorly optimized.

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UpsetKoalaBear@reddit

The optimisation issues fall on the developers. They used temporal effects prior to DLSS in 2018. If it didn’t exist, they would have continued with using horrendous temporal effects. Quantum Break in 2016 launched and was locked to 720p internal resolution using temporal reconstruction of the last 4 frames to play at “1080p” - the game barely ran on most hardware when it launched. That’s the type of shit we were ending up with. If people think that developers were ever going to “optimise” because DLSS didn’t exist, they’re delusional. They would have used temporal effects regardless.

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reddit_equals_censor@reddit

>If people think that developers were ever going to “optimise” because DLSS didn’t exist, they’re delusional. that's the wrong way to look at it. your comment ignores the actual issue. yes lots of games/most were unoptimized garbage, but sth did change. what changed is, that the graphics companies no longer give people more performance. back in the day you could buy yourself a card 2 generations newer, that had no more performance issues to handle the unoptimized game, now you are on a 3060 12 GB and they tell you to downgrade your vram to have a broken experience in almost all new games with a 5060 8 GB broken insult and even if that doesn't happen almost 0 gpu performance increases. amd, but especially nvidia stopped giving people performance increases and not giving people more as in a bare minimum working for now amount of vram is actually becoming a fundamental issue to the gaming industry. before the nightmare, that is going on now (not talking about ai bubble price explosion) so you wanna develop a new game with a 4 year development cycle (assuming no delay), so in the past you could make a reasonable assumption, that by then the current high end vram amount and performance will be mainstream. now you can't even rely on people getting the amount of vram you need to match the ps5 at the end of the ps5 generation (that would be 12 GB vram if you're wondering) so it is NOT a game optimization problem. that was always there sadly. the main issue is, that we just don't get any more performance. and we aren't getting any more performance not because there are process node or other issues. the 4090 is 73% faster than the 3090 in 4k raster at about the same die size. there is no issue scaling performance, but we are no longer getting it, except the highest end 2000+ us dollar card and even that is partially over as nvidia made the 5090 a mostly ai card now with almost no real gaming performance increases.

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UpsetKoalaBear@reddit

> back in the day you could buy yourself a card 2 generations newer, that had no more performance issues to handle the unoptimized game, now you are on a 3060 12 GB and they tell you to downgrade your vram to have a broken experience in almost all new games with a 5060 8 GB broken insult and even if that doesn't happen almost 0 gpu performance increases. Even with 12GB of RAM, that 3060 12GB [still performs worse than the 5060.](https://youtu.be/_FqGW9FOe9Y) Even the 4060 8GB is considerably faster than the 12GB 3060. Also, the 5060 launched at $299. The 3060 12GB was $329. Take into account inflation and the value proposition is generally the better, if not, the same. > the main issue is, that we just don't get any more performance. I will agree with this, the gaps between generations is smaller. > and we aren't getting any more performance not because there are process node or other issues. the 4090 is 73% faster than the 3090 in 4k raster at about the same die size. This is incorrect. The node improvements _did_ matter. The 3090 was on Samsung 8nm. The 4090 is on TSMC’s 5nm node (called 4N). It doesn’t matter about the die size, if you’re improving the node by two generations, you’re going to see an increase in performance. Transistor density increased dramatically. We went from 26m transistors in the 3090 to 76m on the 4090. That was with the 4090 being on a 609mm^2 die and the 3090 being on a 628mm^2 die. The 5090 being on the same node was evidence that it was always going to be a minor jump in performance.

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reddit_equals_censor@reddit

>This is incorrect. The node improvements *did* matter. you misread what i wrote: >and we **aren't** getting any more performance **not** because there are process node or other issues. the 4090 is 73% faster than the 3090 in 4k raster at about the same die size. >there is no issue scaling performance, but we are no longer getting it granted i wrote it like shit, but what i said is, that there isn't some technological reason, that stands in the way of us getting proper performance jumps/price, as for example process node is NOT holding us back. the 4090 is customers getting the performance increase of the process node enabled by the architecture. the 4060 is a middle finger and nvidia pocketing the difference in increased margins, instead of customers getting it. and in regards to games being broken with 8 GB vram now, the video you linked at 1080p just high preset, high res textures (which are not max textures i believe), dlaa has the 4060 and 5060 with 8 GB just NOT RUN at all. ONLY the 3060 12 GB started with those settings. and the 3060 12 GB ran fine at 71 average fps and 56.8 1% lows. so the video you linked showed the 8 GB cards to be broken and unpurchasable at just 1080p. other reviewers showed at 1080p 7/8 at max settings 7/8 games being broken and at 1080p medium 1/8 games is already broken, so you wouldn't even get 1080p medium anymore: [https://youtu.be/IHd95sQ-vWI?si=nGhWO357CNEmIbN2&t=1846](https://youtu.be/IHd95sQ-vWI?si=nGhWO357CNEmIbN2&t=1846) so 8 GB is just broken garbage. if you are on 8 GB rightnow, of course hold on until the ai bubble bursts and what not, but never buy a new 8 GB card. it is a scam and it has been for years. nvidia knew, that the 3070/ti cards were going to break as soon as the first ps5 targeting games were going to come out due to the missing vram having 8 instead of 16 GB vram and they did break massively. crazy that they trippled down on 8 GB vram scams :/ and devs don't even know what to do now. think about that if you develop a game for the ps6 as primary target, that will be a 30 or 40 GB unified memory card. but nvidia is still selling 8 GB cards 2 years before the ps6 comes out and you need about 24 GB vram to match a 30 GB unified memory console. so what are you supposed to do? terrible bs screw nvidia and amd.

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UpsetKoalaBear@reddit

The thing is, the GPU launches at the beginning of a generation have _always_ been bad. I’ll give you an example: The 780 released in 2013, the same year as the PS4. It had 3GB of VRAM. If you tried to play games that released 5 years later at 1080p [they didn’t perform well at all](https://youtu.be/T3DwY78rItk). Meanwhile, the 1080 was incredibly even going into the current generation. That is the same amount of time passed as now. Even in the PS3 era, the Nvidia 7000 series that came out the same year was outdone literally a year later with the 8000 series with DX10 and unified shader support. Then they got outdone again after that. I don’t really know what you expected. The best time to upgrade has _always_ been midway through a console generation.

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reddit_equals_censor@reddit

>The thing is, the GPU launches at the beginning of a console generation have *always* been bad if you wanted longevity. if you don't spend the absolute minimum that actually changed, as sadly sony's playstations are the graphics target. so if you buy a card now at the start of a new console generation, that is a decent bit more powerful than it and has a bit more memory than it normalized for graphics card vs console, then you will be fine for the whole generation. not perfect but fine. the rx 6800 with its 16 GB vram is just fine as it fits that and will do the ps5 target and more just fine until the generation is over. i wish, that pc gaming hardware was the defining factor pushing things forward, but that time is for now over. it is absurd, that the ps5 had to break the neck of the 8 GB vram insult and the shit gpu makers still refused to give up on scamming people yet.

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floof_attack@reddit

The biggest issue with the title and premise is that upscaleing has played an even bigger part of current console tech. The idea that upscaling is somehow "saving" PC gaming is a pretty weak premise given that there is plenty of PC gaming being done at native resolution. Further given that PC gaming has been pretty damn strong for years now and only very recently been put in a bad spot due to hardware costs I'm calling serious bullshit on the entire premise of Ty Sherback's article. Sorry Ty, had you at least mentioned once that consoles were a huge part of how upscaling is being used you might have at least had some credibility. But this bullshit clickbait article is just that, bullshit.

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kasakka1@reddit

Console games however have been using their own tricks where it only looks bad in motion and is thus less noticeable that the resolution drops. At typical TV viewing distances it's also a bit harder to see if it's a bit blurry. AMD FSR use in console games is still not the norm, and Switch 2 is the only thing that supports DLSS afaik. What has changed is that DLSS has become so good that there is little reason to NOT use it. The leftover performance vs native res can be used either for higher image quality (e.g ray-/pathtracing) or higher framerates, whatever suits the user or game.

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reddit_equals_censor@reddit

>with minimal image degradation. Without it, a lot of gamers wouldn't be able to play their favorite games with the fidelity they expect. yeah that is complete bullshit and detached from reality. temporal blur reliant development is a plague upon gaming and the person, who wrote the article might not understand what good, clean, clear and crisp graphics actually still look like. this is how they look like if people here need a reminder: [https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1i2li6s/this\_is\_half\_life\_alyx\_it\_uses\_4x\_msaa\_no\_ray/#lightbox](https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1i2li6s/this_is_half_life_alyx_it_uses_4x_msaa_no_ray/#lightbox) this is half life alyx running blazingly fast with 4x msaa and perfectly clear and crisp. it runs fast, because it has to, because it is a vr game. nvidia's or any other company's ai blur upscaler can not compete and isn't close to true native, especially during movement. the issue is, that most people don't even know what true native looks like, because the shity industry moved to temporal blur reliance with vastly worse graphics. this happened before upscalers with taa being pushed into games and temporal blur reliance through for example dithered hair or undersampled effects and assets, because it gets blurred up anyways with taa or now ai taa.... which dlss is. \_\_\_\_ and now for the premise, that ai upscalers "are saving pc gaming". well let's look at the hardware, that nvidia is selling with the marketing of "ai upscalers" shall we? the 430 us dollar 5060 ti 16 GB, the minimum card, that is working on a vram level for now at least. so 430 us dollars. what's the problem? oh what's that? its die is a 181 mm2 die insult. it is an example of MASSIVE MASSIVE performance/price stagnation. if you go below that price with nvidia (remember we're going with the fake msrps here), then there is only broken 8 GB vram cards left, which are complete regressiones compared to the 3060 12 GB card. but let's do a better comparison rather. the 3060 12 GB, which has a 276 mm2 die compared to the 5060 8 GB, which is an 8 GB vram card and a 181 mm2 die. so they reduced the die size by 34% and the performance is regressed massively, because the 5060 8 GB is broken due to its missing vram and when it isn't broken due to missing vram, then nvidia pocketed most of the performance increases by using a much smaller die. there is endless performance stagnation and the disgusting shit industry is giving you the middle finger and telling you to use ai temporal blur from an even lower base resolution and run everything on low now, because even at 1080p medium 8 GB vram is broken. ai temporal blur upscalers are a middle finger marketing scam to sell you absolutely performance stagnation or even regression. what a bullshit article, that ignores hardware being an utter insult, before nvidia stopped making cards again.

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ClerkProfessional803@reddit

I miss when the consoles had a drip down effect on pc performance. All those 360 and ps4 ports that were so easy to run on modest pc specs. Now we all get unoptimized crap and PC is barely any better.

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mittelwerk@reddit

> All those 360 and ps4 ports that were so easy to run on modest pc specs Three words, one number: Grand Theft Auto 4

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PXLShoot3r@reddit

I suggest you play some games from around 2010 with hardware from back then.

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ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit

People don't see the dissonance of judging older performance of PS4 ports using much faster gtx 10 series GPUs rather than what PS4 architecture is based on

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TwilightOmen@reddit

Yeah, that title is simply wrong. Given what we see from steam hardware surveys, the streaming habits on twitch, all evidence seems to point to the contrary, given how the vast majority seems to indicate playing at native resolution.

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RDgul@reddit

DLSS and FG saves me the fps rate on max settings in most of the modern games. I love it. And looks better then native AA.

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DesperateRise81@reddit

I thought the whole point of 4k was you don't need to concern yourself with AA.

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Strazdas1@reddit

They you were mistaken. at native 4k there is still significant aliasing.

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DesperateRise81@reddit

Maybe it's your eyes, not every redditor being wrong?

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Strazdas1@reddit

Its not everyone being wrong, just you.

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DesperateRise81@reddit

No, and literally every redditor who said 4k is great. Go to r/Monitors . Educate yourself, you ignorant turd.

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Cireme@reddit

Who said that? I don't know about 4K 27" (163 PPI) but even at 4K 32" (138 PPI) you still need anti-aliasing.

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DesperateRise81@reddit

I read on reddit when buying it that the sharpness is unreal and it will be unlike anything before with crystal clear clarity.

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CookiieMoonsta@reddit

Yeah, you shouldn't treat these claims at face value, especially on Reddit and gaming parts of it.

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DesperateRise81@reddit

I dunno dude. I'm feeling pretty confident that they aren't bullshitting me when they say anything less than 240hz is a slide show. Although I will admit that one place they really led me astray was on curved monitors. They made it sound like they were absolutely terrible with a huge adjustment period at minimum. In reality from the day I got it I never even noticed the curve. Also oled/miniled, surprisingly. Not entirely on the image quality, just the sheer fact that almost nothing on PC is gonna give you hdr anyway.

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CookiieMoonsta@reddit

\>I dunno dude. I'm feeling pretty confident that they aren't bullshitting me when they say anything less than 240hz is a slide show. I hope this is sarcasm. \>, just the sheer fact that almost nothing on PC is gonna give you hdr anyway. I have a like 250-300 usd VA MiniLed and HDR is decent. Not my C3 TV level, but I don't really care that much for games, longevity > picture. And I can't fathom spending 500-900USD for a monitor

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kuddlesworth9419@reddit

It depends on the game but yea at 4k a lot of games just don't really need any AA. Others you still require it because the rendering is a mess without any AA. It just depends on how the game is made.

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iDontSeedMyTorrents@reddit

You're still going to need some sort of AA until you start getting into smartphone-level pixel densities, which for current monitor sizes would be around 8K.

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Benmattay@reddit

Interesting how AI reconstruction is boosting gaming visuals. On the image side, 4DDiG Photo Enhancer applies similar AI-driven upscaling to stills, improving resolution and texture fidelity without introducing artifacts.

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TophxSmash@reddit

the AI before AI both of which are not AI

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RealThanny@reddit

It has always been an option to run a game at a lower resolution than the monitor's native one, and rely on a simple upscaler in the monitor itself or via the GPU. The only thing these new-fangled upscalers do is improve the quality a bit, at the expense of image stability, because all temporal algorithms are inherently unstable. That's why even without any upscaling, TAA looks so terrible compared to MSAA and SSAA. I don't use upscaling at all, and won't use it at all. If a game can't run at native resolution with the hardware I'm using at the time, it's not worth playing.

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Qsand0@reddit

> If a game can't run at native resolution with the hardware I'm using at the time, it's not worth playing. And the clown goes wilddd

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NeroClaudius199907@reddit

pipelines arent optimized for msaa thats why you almost never see it in any deferred rendering game.

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Strazdas1@reddit

This is true. However i think thats 100% the fault on the game engine developers. They designed the engines to not support MSAA anymore.

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RealThanny@reddit

I'm aware of that. It takes effort to use MSAA these days, which developers aren't putting in. That doesn't change the fact that it's better than TAA, which has become a crutch to make up for a lack of quality in many cases. Which, of course, fails when the scene changes rapidly enough. SSAA is still king, but it reduces performance notably, so is really only accessible for older games. At least it can still be forced in the driver.

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CookiieMoonsta@reddit

It's not effort. MSAA only smoothens edges (think triangles). It never helped with any other aliasing, like shader aliasing, texture shimmering, hair nose, jagged shadows, etc. TAA/DLSS/FSR/XeSS tackle everything, instead of only being good around mostly sharp edges. SSAA is quite literally the old version of DLAA - you render the whole thing at a higher res and downscale it. Both MSAA and SSAA are outdated and not needed today.

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randomkidlol@reddit

it really sucks how temporal upscalers, AI boosted or not, became the norm. it was a blurry mess in motion from day, and its a blurry mess a decade later.

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Nicholas-Steel@reddit

> I'm aware of that. It takes effort to use MSAA these days, which developers aren't putting in. It's not about effort, deferred rendering engines make it extremely inefficient and the benefits marginal. You'd need to use a forward rendering engine which brings with it numerous shortcomings in order to get the full benefits of MSAA.

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PXLShoot3r@reddit

You are indeed not aware.

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Strazdas1@reddit

and the upscalers manage to take lower quality and make it better than native. The old methods were vastly inferior.

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AdventurousBit1780@reddit

saving PC gaming? That would be the people developing emulators and modding games, making fan games, etc. We don't even need new games on pc for the next 5 years and there's nothing that needs saving

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Little_Inspection975@reddit

Nvidia backing the company taking global ram Nvidia tech helps gamers We should be thankful? Think more people would've been more thankful for having access to better and cheaper hardware to access higher settings & frames at reasonable cost

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Strazdas1@reddit

You should be thankful your luxury products for your luxury hobby exist in the first place for had you been born even 100 years before youd be spending 90% of your waking hours doing manual labour in the fields.

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Fast_Passenger_2890@reddit

It makes developers lazy in my opinion. Gives them an excuse to ship a badly optimised game

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

They've always used tricks Many screen space and volumetric effects from the 'optimised era' were also running sub-native

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Strazdas1@reddit

hah. Many textures, shaders, shadows, bump maps ran in sub native rendering. Dont even need to get any fancier features for that. In fact shadows often still run sub-native. People are just used to it.

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CookiieMoonsta@reddit

People just don't really know about game dev and how their fav games are actually built. Smart render culling, low-res shadows/lights/textures in unseen areas, smart LOD biases that change objects on the fly and many other subtle tricks to improve performance have always existed. It's just that before it became "lazy AI devs", people never bothered to learn. Hell, temporal upscaling has been there since forever at this point (and it sucked).

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DeepJudgment@reddit

Games have been shipping badly optimized long before TAA became a thing, let alone DLSS. Lazy devs have never had trouble finding an excuse

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Strazdas1@reddit

Remmeber the horrible ports that ran sub 30 fps on any hardware because the engine itself choked at framerate? What we get nowadays is great in comparison.

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2FastHaste@reddit

They never needed excuses to target low fps. They've always done it and they'll continue.

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kuddlesworth9419@reddit

Graphics don't make a game good, gameplay does.

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ConditionTall1719@reddit

Saving graphics cards profits yes, saving games NO. NVIDIA would like that article because it's a way to increase claims and reduce silicon. 3D hyper detail is actually a small % on Steam.

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RHINO_Mk_II@reddit

They're making unsloptimized games playable, but those can be avoided and still have a lovely time PC gaming.

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carlosfupayme@reddit

The only thing wrong with ai is companies not wanting you to own ai, but rather rent it from them via subscriptions.

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Blue-150@reddit

Manufacturers made a decision to bet big on upscaling technology in order to decrease hardware cost. Had we never used upscaling, raw rasterization gains like the past would be more common. This money saving strategy is working, but also its worth noting that we are being "saved" from those who created the problem. And developers get lazy when GPUs are powerful, whether raw or upscaled

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Little_Inspection975@reddit

But it will be bottlenecked by consoles. If 70% of pc had pcs equal to 7800xt by now. We wont see games that take advantage of the hardware.

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Aggravating-Dot132@reddit

Outside of working on good TAA (all 3 are TAA with deep learning), they aren't needed. And problem is the current engines, not development. UE5 requires it

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