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IT Technology

Nvidia Reveals AI Supercomputer Used Non-Stop For Six Years To Perfect Gaming Graphics (pcgamer.com) 51

Nvidia has dedicated a supercomputer running thousands of its latest GPUs exclusively to improving its DLSS upscaling technology for the past six years, a company executive revealed at CES 2025. Speaking at the RTX Blackwell Editor's Day in Las Vegas, Brian Catanzaro, Nvidia's VP of applied deep learning research, said the system operates continuously to analyze failures and retrain models across hundreds of games.

Nvidia Reveals AI Supercomputer Used Non-Stop For Six Years To Perfect Gaming Graphics

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  • by Smidge204 ( 605297 )

    NVIDIA: Spends millions of dollars refining graphics technology by analyzing games.

    Game industry: Actively imploding under the weight of development costs for those graphics [slashdot.org]

    Indie developers: Makes games with minimalist graphics
    =Smidge=

    • by Rinnon ( 1474161 )
      Indie games (made with Unity for example) still benefit from DLSS; that DLSS exists, and that Nvidia is spending their money refining it, isn't forcing the AAA Gaming industry to chase the magic dragon that is "the best" cutting edge graphics. They are doing that to themselves, despite (and to your point) the fact that indie games with extremely modest graphics can sell just as well as a AAA title, often better.
      • > isn't forcing the AAA Gaming industry to chase the magic dragon that is "the best" cutting edge graphic

        Never implied that was the case.

        It's just ironic that NVIDIA has been spending all these resources on improving a technology that is poised to be in increasingly less demand. AAA spending on graphics is likely to shrink, and much of indie game developers never really needed it in the first place.
        =Smidge=

        • by Njovich ( 553857 )

          DLSS is one of these ways that game developers get cheaper 'good' results. Can skip a lot of optimization if you don't have to render at full resolution. So actually, this is exactly that enables those less spending companies.

          As an example, it is rumored that Nintendo - which is not known for state of the art graphics - will make heavy use of DLSS in the upcoming Switch 2

          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            DLSS makes games look a lot worse. There's a reason why it's only ever compared to TAA smeared screenshots in promotional materials, never full motion without TAA vomit. Because it looks so bad, that comparing it to non-TAA smeared images immediately demonstrates how much worse it is.

            The reason to use DLSS is if your game is horrifically poorly optimized (a lot of shovelware made on unreal 5 is in this category) and you don't have time to optimize. You just say "run it with upscaling and fake frames", pop m

            • you arent looking at this from the developer side

              full stop
              • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                Same reason you're not looking at your food from producer's perspective. You don't care that it would be way cheaper to make the oranges blotched and misshapen, and a bit worse tasting. You would choose the tasty, colorful oranges every time. Because you don't care, you're a consumer of the product, and you have your preferences. And you have a right to your preferences.

                And that is why "full stop" developers are running into walls. And having those "full stops". Turns out you can't produce slop that you wou

            • The reason to use DLSS is that you can't afford the latest RTX*090.
              • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                Funny considering that DLSS2 strips a lot less detail when going 1400 to 4k than lower resolutions. Which with RTX is actually made for... xx90 series, because lower end ones struggle with highest level of RTX and DLSS2 ultra at those resolutions.

  • They are going to push interpolation and upscaling tech to ad nauseam, and it will become as much welcome as FXAA.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    • by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Thursday January 16, 2025 @02:46PM (#65094279)

      No, temporal reconstruction isn't going anywhere. If you're not using DLSS or FSR, you're probably using TAA, which is kind of the same thing (just worse), and if you're not using TAA, you probably don't have any anti-aliasing. And you're going to see similar techniques used in more and more places. Denoising raytracing and ray bounce caching, for example. Or infill for reprojection for reducing latency, something that is already at basically 100% usage with VR.

      DLSS-type techniques are just way better at temporal reconstruction and denoising than previous techniques, they're now common on game consoles (FSR on Xbox and Playstation, PSSR on Playstation, soon DLSS on Switch 2), and will eventually be ubiquitous and probably borderline mandatory.

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Thursday January 16, 2025 @04:20PM (#65094477)

        For those that don't understand what this is about. Temporal smoothing of everything allows developers to hide a tremendous amount of crap under the horribly smoothed appearance and artifacts. This is especially true for UE5 games, where if you turn off TAA or DLSS, you'll see horrible visual artifacts that temporal smoothing hid.

        It's why other forms of anti-aliasing are increasingly removed. They don't hide all the horribleness like TAA and DLSS does. This is also why DLSS marketing materials are pretty much always "compare to TAA image" rather than "original image". It would reveal that original is either words better because it's designed correctly without massive amounts of artifacts, or alternatively that it's way worse because it shows all the artifacts.

        The memes of people posting screenshots from old games like MGS5 and asking "why does this look better than most of the modern UE5 games" is universally answered "TAA and DLSS and other temporal smoothing that is used to hide shitty and buggy design features by presenting a smoothed out, horrible looking image compared to old sharp looking games".

        • I have no idea what you're talking about. I love DLSS. In terms of AA, only supersampling looks any better, but DLSS improves performance rather than tanking it.

          If you can afford hardware that will run something like Stalker2 with DSR to correct aliasing, then great, I'm happy for you. I can't. I need DLSS and frame generation.

          Ray tracing is hideously expensive in terms of processing power. I don't know why you're complaining about the technology that makes it available to me.

          • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

            Do you have a VA monitor by any chance?

            Because there is a group of people who genuinely love the smoothed out look where all details are just deleted from the image. They tend to buy VA monitors, as they produce it naturally.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Thursday January 16, 2025 @04:14PM (#65094457)

      Oh, it's even worse. They're now advocating for straight up inserting multiple fake frames to give an illusion of smooth gameplay to avoid optimizing games. DLSS3 was just one fake frame between real ones, DLSS4 is multiple fake frames.

      We're about to have really choppy game play that looks "smooth" because of all the fake frames posted on top of the 24FPS cinematic experience underneath them.

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Oh, it's even worse. They're now advocating for straight up inserting multiple fake frames to give an illusion of smooth gameplay to avoid optimizing games. DLSS3 was just one fake frame between real ones, DLSS4 is multiple fake frames.

        We're about to have really choppy game play that looks "smooth" because of all the fake frames posted on top of the 24FPS cinematic experience underneath them.

        This is what happens when Nvidia moved from GPUs to AI. They don't care about gamers - GPUs make up 10% of their reve

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          More of an AMD's (and to lesser extent Intel's) fault. They're not competitive at mid and high end. Nvidia has demonstrated countless times that it can target long term future, and continue to diversify while holding on to its old niches. It's diversifying from AI already into things like robotics, because it knows that current boom won't last forever, and it's CUDA derived advantage is getting rapidly eroded by development of model-specific ASICs which is rapidly ongoing.

  • Wow, they did all that just to make it laggy, unresponsive, inaccurate, "smeary" and so they could lie about framerates. I would have done things differently. Tell consumers not the buy 4k monitors. That's it. That's the entire plan. WAY cheaper.
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Steam hardware survey reveals that overwhelming majority of gamers is still on 1080, with small minority being on 1440, and almost no one on 4k.

      But Steam's sales numbers according to presentation that just went viral on X reveal that it alone is bigger than entire PC gaming market was just a few years ago, and only a small fraction of spending on steam is going towards new games. Turns out people don't buy woke, TAA smoothed slop, and instead spend on older games.

      There's a lot of butthurt on the topic of "w

  • At the end of the day, anti-aliasing in all things rendering is *hard*

    Upscaling AI is born from this. The problem is that it isnt used to solve hard rendering problems in practice, its actually used to cover up straight up bad rendering techniques.

    TAA is implemented poorly or worse in most games/engines and you need the upscaler just to mask it. The newest games not only dont allow you to turn off TAA they dont allow you to turn off AI upscaling either. Say hello to Nanite.

    Whats going to happen is a d
  • Unfortunately, the image will be fake and a digital hallucination.

    But, seriously, I don't see how they can make this kind of claim without some sort of closed-loop quality verification and repeatable results, because who's to say they're not releasing DLSS/DLDSR to show hate symbols or private parts in one or more games within a certain set of input data?

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." -- Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT

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