Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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> All of the "massive gains" were comparing DLSS and other optimization strategies to standard hardware rendering.

> Something tells me Nvidia made next to no gains for this generation.

Sounds to me like they made "massive gains". In the end, what matters to gamers is

1. Do my games look good? 2. Do my games run well?

If I can go from 45 FPS to 120 FPS and the quality is still there, I don't care if it's because of frame generation and neural upscaling and so on. I'm not going to be upset that it's not lovingly rasterized pixel by pixel if I'm getting the same results (or better, in some cases) from DLSS.

To say that Nvidia made no gains this generation makes no sense when they've apparently figured out how to deliver better results to users for less money.

Rasterizing results in better graphics quality than DLSS if compute is not a limiting factor. They are trying to do an apples to oranges comparison by comparing the FPS of standard rendering to upscaled images.

I use DLSS type tech, but you lose a lot of fine details with it. Far away text looks blurry, textures aren’t as rich, and lines between individual models lose their sharpness.

Also, if you’re spending $2000 for a toy you are allowed to have high standards.

> if compute is not a limiting factor.

If we're moving towards real time tracing compute is going to always be a limitting factor, as it was in the days of pre rendering. Granted currently raster techniques can simulate ray trace pretty well in many scenarios and looks much better in motion, IMO that's more limitation of real time ray trace. There's a bunch of image quality improvements beyond raster to be gained if enough compute is throw at ray tracing, i think a lot of dlss / frame generation goal is basically to offload more cpu to generate higher IQ hero frames while filling in blanks.

> Rasterizing results in better graphics quality than DLSS if compute is not a limiting factor.

Sure, but compute is a limiting factor.

I was demonstrating the Apples to Oranges comparison. If they were both free no one would pick DLSS. It shows Rasterizing is preferable. So comparing Rasterizing performance to DLSS performance is dishonest.

Except that if rendering was magically free... why not just pathtrace everything?

DLSS might not be as good as pure unlimited pathtracing, but for a given budget it might be better than rasterization alone.

I agree it’s worth the trade off. I use upscalers a lot.

I’m saying that it’s different enough that you shouldn’t compare the two.

DLSS 4 uses a completely new model with twice as many parameters and seems to be a big improvement.

I hope so, because it looks like 8k traditional rendering won’t be an option for this decade.

Will NEXT decade be possible?

8k traditional rendering at 144Hz is a lot of pixels. We are seeing a 25%/3 years improvement cycle on traditional rendering at this point, and we need about 8x improvement in current performance to get there.

2040 is definitely possible, but certainly not guaranteed.

So at 2040 we might be able to render at top 2025 display specs.

Makes you wonder how far ahead displays will be in 2040. I can imagine display prices falling in price and increasing in quality to the point where many homes just have displays paneled around the walls instead of paint.

You won't be using display panels / monitors at all. It will be the Apple Vision Pro 14 Pro Max. A tiny thing you touch on your head and you view the rasterized world at 12k 120fps all around you.

Why is that an issue? Do you have an 8k monitor?

Even 4k monitors are relatively rare and most monitors today are still 1080p, 60 Hz. Yes, you don't need a 5090 to play games on that, but 5090 is a very niche product, while x060 cards are the overwhelming majority. 8k rendering is needed just for the 5 or 6 people that wants it.

there aren't many 8k monitors. I would rather have 300fps 4k

What is the draw to 300fps?

240Hz or higher monitors. 4K is enough for spatial resolution then it is better to increase temporal resolution. 4K at 240Hz stops looking like looking at a screen and starts looking out a window.

4K alone is not enough to define spatial resolution. You also need take into account physical dimensions. DPI is a better way to describe spatial resolution. Anything better than 200 DPI is good, better than 300 is awesome.

Unfortunately, there are no 4K displays with 200+ DPI on the market. If you want high DPI you either need pick glossy 5k@27" or go to 6k/8k.

of course "normal viewing distances" is always implied when talking about monitors. And if you REALLY want to get pedantic you need to talk about pixels per degree. The human eye can see about 60. according to the very handy site https://qasimk.io/screen-ppd/

a 27" 1080p screen has 37ppd at 2 feet.

a 42" 4k screen has 51ppd at 2 feet.

a 27" 8k screen has 147ppd at 2 feet which is just absurd.

You have to get to 6 inches for the PPD to be 61

> The human eye can see about 60

I cannot brag with sharp eyesight, but I can definitely tell difference between 4k@27" at 60cm = 73PPD and 5k@27" at 60cm = 97PPD. Text is much crisper on the latter.

I've also compared Dell 8k to 6k. There is a still a difference, but it is not that big.

"Much crisper"

You must have exceptional eyesight.

But a 42" 8K screen should have around ~100 ppd, which is really nice but not unnecessarily detailed.

I know I'll be gunning for the 42" 8K's whenever they actually reach a decent market price. Sigh, still too many years away.

> Unfortunately, there are no 4K displays with 200+ DPI on the market.

There are 4k 24" monitors (almost 200 DPI) and 4k 18.5" portable monitors (more than 200 DPI) you can buy nowadays

4k 24" monitors used to exist, but they've disappeared from the market and now the choices are either 27+" or laptop panels.

Why did they stop making those? When I went to 4K, I wanted to get a 24” monitor, but there were none.

VR, probably.

People with 240Hz or higher monitors. 4K is enough for spatial resolution then it is better to increase temporal resolution. 4K at 240Hz or higher looks like a window.

Well if they can reach 300fps at 4k then they can prove to everybody once and for all that their dick is bigger than everybody elses.

Cause it ain't about the gameplay or the usefulness. It's all about that big dick energy.

DLSS is becoming the standard rendering.

It's not. It's becoming the standard lazy choice for devs though.

Because if two frames are fake and only one frame is based off of real movements, then you've actually lost a fair bit of latency and will have noticably laggier controls.

Making better looking individual frames and benchmarks for worse gameplay experiences is an old tradition for these GPU makers.

DLSS 4 can actually generate 3 frames for ever 1 raster frame. When talking about frame rates well above 200 per second a few extra frames isn't that big of a deal unless you are a professional competitive gamer.

If you're buying a ridiculously expensive card for gaming you likely consider yourself a pro gamer. I don't think ai interpolation will be popular in the market

It really depends on how well it works.

If anyone thinks they are having laggier controls or losing latency off of single frames I have a bridge to sell them.

A game running at 60 fps averages around ~16 ms and good human reaction times don’t go much below 200ms.

Users who “notice” individual frames are usually noticing when a single frame is lagging for the length of several frames at the average rate. They aren’t noticing anything within the span of an average frame lifetime

you’re conflating reaction times and latency perception. these are not the same. humans can tell the difference down to 10ms, perhaps lower.

if you added 200ms latency to your mouse inputs, you’d throw your computer out the of the window pretty quickly.

yeah the "distance between frames" latency is just one overhead, everything adds up until you get real latency. 10ms for your wireless mouse then 3ms for your I/O hardware then 5ms for the game engine to process your input then 20ms for the graphics pipeline and so on and on.

30 FPS is 33.33333 MS 60 FPS is 16.66666 MS 90 FPS is 11.11111 MS 120 FPS is 8.333333 MS 140 FPS is 7.142857 MS 144 FPS is 6.944444 MS 180 FPS is 5.555555 MS 240 FPS is 4.166666 MS

Going from 30fps to 120fps is 25ms which is totally 100% noticeable even for layman (I actually tested this with my girlfriend, she could tell between 60fps and 120fps as well), but these generated frames from DLSS don't help with this latency _at all_.

Although the nVidia Reflex technology can help with this kind of latency in some situations in some non quantifiable ways.

Or at least defenestrate the mouse.

You think normal people can't tell? Go turn your monitor to 60hz in your video options and move your mouse in circles on your desktop, then go turn it back to 144hz or higher and move it around on your screen. If an average csgo or valorant player where to play with framegen while the real fps was about 60 and the rest of the frames where fake, it would be so completely obvious it's almost laughable. That said the 5090 can obviously run those games at 200+fps so they would just turn off any frame gen stuff. But a new/next gen twitch shooter will for sure expose it.

>If an average csgo or valorant player were to play with framegen while the real fps was about 60

That's just it isn't. This stuff isn't "only detectable by profession competitive gamers" like many are proposing. It's instantly noticeable to the average gamer.

What I think is going on here has to do with lousy game engine implementations: with modern graphics APIs you have to take extra steps beyond relying on the swapchain to avoid running ahead of the GPU for multiple frames. It's not obvious and and I suspect a lot of games aren't that good at managing that. If the CPU runs ahead, you have a massive multi-frame input-to-screen lag that changes a lot with monitor FPS. But it's not the extra frames themselves that make the difference. It's just correcting for poor code.

I can and do notice when a driver update or similar switches my monitor's refresh rate or mouse polling rate down. In the game I play most there is an inbuilt framerate test tool to see what the best framerate you can notice the difference between visually is. I and many other players are consistent (20 correct in a row) up to 720fps.

I'll take that bridge off your hands.

These are NVidia's financial results last quarter:

- Data Center: Third-quarter revenue was a record $30.8 billion

- Gaming and AI PC: Third-quarter Gaming revenue was $3.3 billion

If the gains are for only 10% of your customers, I would put this closer to the "next to no gains" rather than the "massive gains".

DLSS artifacts are pretty obvious to me. Modern games relying on temporal anti aliasing and raytracing tend to be blurry and flickery. I prefer last-gen games at this point, and would love a revival of “brute force” rasterization.

As long as you can still disable DLSS from the game menu, it is good enough for me. I don't care about fake frames, I disable fake frames.

If you're doing frame generation you're getting input lag. Frame generation from low framerates is pretty far from ideal.

Nvidia claims to have fixed this with Nvidia reflex 2. It will reposition the frame according to mouse movements.

Fake frames, fake gains

Are DLSS frames any more fake than the computed P or B frames?

Yes.

how so?

P and B frames are compressed versions of a reference image. Frames resulting from DLSS frame generation are predictions of what a reference image might look like even though one does not actually exist.

But MPEG is lossy compression which means they are kind of a just a guess. That is why MPEG uses motion vectors.

"MPEG uses motion vectors to efficiently compress video data by identifying and describing the movement of objects between frames, allowing the encoder to predict pixel values in the current frame based on information from previous frames, significantly reducing the amount of data needed to represent the video sequence"

There's a real difference between a lossy approximation as done by video compression, and the "just a guess" done by DLSS frame generation. Video encoders have the real frame to use as a target; when trying to minimize the artifacts introduced by compressing with reference to other frames and using motion vectors, the encoder is capable of assessing its own accuracy. DLSS fundamentally has less information when generating new frames, and that's why it introduces much worse motion artifacts.

it would be VERY interesting to have actual quantitative data on how many possible I video frames map to a specific P or B frame vs how many possible raster frames map to a given predicted DLSS frame. The lower this ration the more "accurate" the prediction is.

Compression and prediction are the same. Decompressing a lossy format is guessing how the original image might have looked like. The difference between fake frames and P and B frames is that the difference between prediction of fake frame and real frame is dependant on the user input.

... now I wonder ... Do DLSS models take mouse movements and keypresses into account?

The fps gains are directly because of the AI compute cores, I’d say that’s a net gain but not a the traditional sense preAI.

Kind of a half gain: smoothness improved, latency same or slightly worse.

By the way, I thought these AI things served to increase resolution, not frame rate. Why doesn't it work that way?

It's both. And it's going to continue until games are 100% and AI fever dream.

Right, I should have said "generate extra pixels in every frame, not interpolate whole frames". Doing the former also increases frame rate by reducing computation per pixel.

The human eye can't see more than 60 fps anyway

This is factually incorrect and I don't know where people get this idea from.

Just moving my mouse around, I can tell the difference between 60 and 144 fps when I move my pointer from my main monitor (144 hz) to my second monitor (60 hz).

Watching text scroll is noticeably smoother and with less eye tracking motion blur at 144 hz versus 60.

An object moving across my screen at 144 fps will travel fewer pixels per frame than 60 fps. This gain in motion fluidity is noticeable.

I remember when it was "the human eye can't see more than cinematic 24fps" sour grapes by people who couldn't get 60fps

Can definitely see more than 60, but it varies how much more you can see. For me it seems like diminishing returns beyond 144Hz.

Though some CRT emulation techniques require more than that to scale realistic 'flickering' effects.

You are right, but diminishing returns technically start around 60.

The human eyes are analog low pass filters, so beyond 60Hz is when things start to blur together, which is still desirable since that's what we see in real life. But there is a cutoff where even the blurring itself can no longer help increase fidelity. Also keep in mind that this benefit helps visuals even when the frame rate is beyond human response time.

This is laughably false and easy to disprove. Blurbusters did an analysis of this many years ago and we won't get "retina" refresh rates until we're at 1000Hz.

i can tell up to about 144Hz but struggle to really notice going from 144 to 240Hz. Even if you don't consciously notice the higher refresh rate it could still help for really fast paced games like competitive FPS if you can actually generate that many frames per second by reducing input latency and if you can actually respond fast enough.

Same with me. At least on LCD. I'm still gonna get 480hz OLED display because I'm curious.

I have 2070 Super. Latest Call of Duty runs on 4k with good quality using DLSS with 60 fps and I can't notice at all (unless I look very closely, even with my 6k ProDisplay XDR) so yeah I was thinking of building a 5090 based computer and it will probably last many more years than my 2070 super with latest AI developments.

>Do my games look good

i d like to point you to r/FuckTAA

>Do my games run well

if the internal logic is still in sub 120 hz and it is a twichy game, then no

Any frame gen gains don’t improve latency so the usefulness is reduced

Nvidia reflex 2 is supposed to fix that. It will recenter the frame based on mouse movements.

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