CD Projekt Red and Nvidia recently joined Digital Foundry to discuss the implications of DLSS 3.5 in the new expansion of Cyberpunk 2077.

During the interview, Nvidia’s Vice President of Deep Learning Research, Bryan Catanzaro, made it clear that gaming at native resolution is no longer an option if developers aim for maximum graphical fidelity.

YouTube video

The above statement came after discussing the future of native gaming due to the current focus on AI and upscaling technologies.  Catanzaro further added that it is impossible to improve a game’s graphical fidelity through pure rasterization performance.

One reason was that ‘Moore’s Law is dead,’ and graphics card hardware development is almost at its end. Therefore, it is no longer possible to gain double-digit performance improvements from gen-on-gen development alone.

The fact is that real-time ray-tracing or path ray-tracing was never possible without upscaling technologies like DLSS. Catanzaro also believes upscaling technology like DLSS and ray-tracing will replace traditional rendering.

He pointed to the fact that a game like Cyberpunk 2077 looks better with DLSS 3.5 compared to native rendering since the AI algorithm is able to make better judgments about the image.

Games like Starfield and Remnant 2 are already relying on upscaling-based rendering to offer a suitable gaming experience, and it appears this trend is just getting started.

DLSS might be the future of rendering, but the technology, no matter how good, will always be a compromise to native rendering. However, if Nvidia thinks upscaling is the future of rendering games, then the industry can only go two ways.

Developers can either come up with games like Starfield and Remnant 2 with less-than-stellar graphical fidelity that still require very high system resources, offering upscaling as a possible fix.

On the other hand, they can start making games that offer realistic-looking graphics with everything ray-tracing has to offer for future hardware. This would lead to poor performance on mid-range hardware but an incredible experience for high-end hardware.

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Malik Usman
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