AI Photorealism For Games Is Here, And It Misses The Point Entirely

NVIDIA recently premiered the fifth version of their DLSS, which stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling. ^[1] It is a technology that allows users to utilize artificial intelligence native to their NVIDIA graphics cards to enhance gaming graphics. ^[2]

To be fair to NVIDIA, they are not just slapping a cheap filter over the top of their hardware’s output. The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, stated that the system processes the actual objects within the games themselves rather than just what is visible on the screen. ^[3] I will grant them the technical achievement. It is a massive engineering feat to figure out the geometry of a digital room and invent pixels out of thin air to smooth it all out. But this is where the commendations end.

There is a reason why we Indonesians completely disregard some upmarket Western print copy of our beloved Batik. ^[4] Anyone with a printer can take an image from the internet and turn it into an everyday shirt. But it takes real dedication to the arts to create something from within yourself. ^[5] This is the necessary context for why this supposed technological advancement falls completely flat. This attempt at faux photorealism rips the heart out of an art style of a game and replaces it with an algorithm’s best guess at what reality is supposed to look like.

If you are a person who thinks games can be improved by turning them into some kind of uncanny valley output at the cost of the art style that the developers intended, then perhaps this is the product for you. However, when you look at the actual output of this faux photorealism, it looks incredibly familiar. It looks like the kind of synthetic [UNVERIFIED: AI-generated] image that your uncles and aunties send to WhatsApp group chats depicting disasters that never happened, specifically to justify their delusions of the Illuminati. ^[6] It is an airbrushed pseudo-reality, completely detached from the creative intent of the people who actually built the game.

People will inevitably come out of the woodwork to say that this is just an extension of what has always been around. Modding has existed for a million years. But modders enhance games by adding features or playables that add to or alter the experience of the games themselves. ^[7] It is a creative act of addition. This is not addition; it is replacement.

Of course, there is an exception to this total dismissal of automated graphical enhancement. For sports titles, a genre where the pursuit of photorealism is the primary artistic intent rather than an anomaly, this technology actually makes sense. If you are using it for [UNVERIFIED: FIFA], go ahead. At least there the goal is to precisely replicate a broadcast television feed, and the original art style is already anchored in the mundane reality of physical stadiums and human faces. But for stylized games, replacing a developer’s vision with smoothed-out algorithmic guessing is a technological fix looking for a problem it does not actually solve.

Make of that what you will.