The "photorealism" of that ML demo was vastly overstated. A lot of post processing effects in games are there to (somewhat ironically) emulate defects of camera

The "photorealism" of that ML demo was vastly overstated. A lot of post processing effects in games are there to (somewhat ironically) emulate defects of cameras: vignetting, chromatic aberration, bloom, flares etc. I think this ML demo got there by effectively emulating a low-res, poorly white balanced, low framerate dash cam. I think those "defects" make people see the image looking more like the output of a real (albeit shitty) camera system. It would be more interesting to see what kind of output we could get at 4K 60fps and properly white balanced.