4 ms·

When did we reach such a plateau with GPU tech, that we have to resort to this fake super-resolution stuff instead of just rendering more pixels?

Almondsetat 2y ago
explain what's fake about it without invalidating the entire history of video game performance tricks
- doctorhandshake 2y ago
  I love the fake nature of graphics tricks. It’s smoke and mirrors but the mirrors and the smoke are fake too!
doctorhandshake 2y ago
Not every frame is rendered on the highest powered hardware with the highest settings. On mobile, battery life is important. On desktop, in gaming, many players don’t have the highest-end graphics cards. And even for those who do, GPU resources are often committed to other tasks beyond rendering like simulation, NPC AI, etc. Super resolution allows for apparently higher pixel count with (in some cases) acceptable image quality while still using GPU for compute or not burning up the battery.
WithinReason 2y ago
Faking is what real time computer graphics is all about. You should rather ask: Why should we perform a long chain of complex computations just to produce the same pixel that was already there on the previous frame, instead of using our resources to produce something new?
- keyringlight 2y ago
  Another aspect to the temporal-based techniques is that they jitter where the sample is done within the pixel, so over a few frames it accumulates more information than purely having that one sample per frame as the truth of what that pixel is. Plus if the renderer knows about the world and how its moving, and passes that to the TAA function you can track the rendered history for that element of the scene when it's moved. There's more information available to create a higher quality image for a low cost. Render resolution has been less tightly linked to display resolution for a long time, and some games have done that on different elements in a scene for a long time (I remember seeing it in Psychonauts from 2005). Variable Rate Shading is another tool developers have to pull resources away from areas it's not going to be noticed. What I've been wondering about for a while is what's the furthest a developer could push it to smartly spend performance instead of doing it on the full frame, how much effort does it take to hint to these systems that different elements are more or less important, and then compose them together in a way that doesn't have obvious flaws.
klodolph 2y ago
If you remember back in the day when we just had MSAA and nothing else, it was horribly slow. “Just render more pixels” turns out to give you poor efficiency. Better efficiency = you can spend the cycles doing something more interesting. In other words—if GPUs were powerful enough to just push more pixels to the screen, then we would still use these upsampling techniques anyway, save a bunch of computational power, and then spend that computational power improving the graphics in other ways.
dudegpus 2y ago
This is not fake... We literally generate 30-60 pictures every single second. Every picture has information in it which combined gives you more unfaked information. Your viewpoint doesn't change it's content every single frame. This only happens when you rotate super fast 180degree or warp through a portal or whatever.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  Actually 1deg is enough.
  - dudegpus 2y ago
    It doesn't change completely. We take the information from the previous frame and now have more information than before as long as it's the same object we render
GrantMoyer 2y ago
All anti-aliasing techniques are essentially faking the effect of subsampling a higher resolution render. Temporal anti-aliasing is a pretty darn good anti-aliasing method, since it uses more real information than other methods except for (well implemented) brute force supersampling. It's also a little unique, since it can be tweaked to actually produce that intermediate higher resolution render, which is how we get temporal super resolution.
numpad0 2y ago
Grainy 60fps is better experience than choppy FHD, to both play and to deliver to consumers. Right now, GPU performance on lower end phones is a problem that both differentiates high end ARM chips from the rest, and is also harming app growths. 60fps on non-SD8 SoCs is going to sell more Play Store cards, and also co-incidentally more ARM licenses. Maybe it could also preemptively save Google Tensor before its public reputation points run out. Game players also gets better experience, but that's maybe entirely coincidental.
archagon 2y ago
FWIW, DLSS feels like magic. I get something like 50% perf improvement with almost no loss in fidelity. Lets me play modern games at 4k/120hz on my 3080 without too many problems.
sitkack 2y ago
TFA shows how much energy this saves.
kevingadd 2y ago
It's less a plateau and more scaling boundaries. Mobile chips especially are limited in power and die space so if you want to produce a high-resolution image at acceptable frame rates, either quality-per-pixel or pixel count have to drop compared to stuff that's plugged into the wall. Each generation of chip on desktop or mobile is still much faster than the previous, but that's battling with increased quality-per-pixel and higher screen resolutions/refresh rates. DLSS/XeSS allow dropping the pixel count and then reconstructing a satisfactory image, which means you can either cut power draw for near-equivalent quality, or use the newly available headroom to improve quality-per-pixel further or deliver higher framerates. One dirty secret when it comes to mobile phones and tablets is that games were already rendering below native resolution - Apple basically told developers to do this in the early Retina era, since it wasn't feasible to render at native with good framerates - since it saves power and the screens are so high-res that most users won't be able to tell the difference. I can't remember the last time I launched a game on my phone and it was actually rendering at native resolution. So in that context, techniques like FSR or this new upscaler are just replacing the existing bilinear/bicubic upscale filter.

Almondsetat 2y ago

explain what's fake about it without invalidating the entire history of video game performance tricks

doctorhandshake 2y ago
I love the fake nature of graphics tricks. It’s smoke and mirrors but the mirrors and the smoke are fake too!

doctorhandshake 2y ago

Not every frame is rendered on the highest powered hardware with the highest settings. On mobile, battery life is important. On desktop, in gaming, many players don’t have the highest-end graphics cards. And even for those who do, GPU resources are often committed to other tasks beyond rendering like simulation, NPC AI, etc. Super resolution allows for apparently higher pixel count with (in some cases) acceptable image quality while still using GPU for compute or not burning up the battery.

WithinReason 2y ago

Faking is what real time computer graphics is all about. You should rather ask: Why should we perform a long chain of complex computations just to produce the same pixel that was already there on the previous frame, instead of using our resources to produce something new?

keyringlight 2y ago
Another aspect to the temporal-based techniques is that they jitter where the sample is done within the pixel, so over a few frames it accumulates more information than purely having that one sample per frame as the truth of what that pixel is. Plus if the renderer knows about the world and how its moving, and passes that to the TAA function you can track the rendered history for that element of the scene when it's moved. There's more information available to create a higher quality image for a low cost. Render resolution has been less tightly linked to display resolution for a long time, and some games have done that on different elements in a scene for a long time (I remember seeing it in Psychonauts from 2005). Variable Rate Shading is another tool developers have to pull resources away from areas it's not going to be noticed. What I've been wondering about for a while is what's the furthest a developer could push it to smartly spend performance instead of doing it on the full frame, how much effort does it take to hint to these systems that different elements are more or less important, and then compose them together in a way that doesn't have obvious flaws.

klodolph 2y ago

If you remember back in the day when we just had MSAA and nothing else, it was horribly slow. “Just render more pixels” turns out to give you poor efficiency. Better efficiency = you can spend the cycles doing something more interesting. In other words—if GPUs were powerful enough to just push more pixels to the screen, then we would still use these upsampling techniques anyway, save a bunch of computational power, and then spend that computational power improving the graphics in other ways.

dudegpus 2y ago

This is not fake... We literally generate 30-60 pictures every single second. Every picture has information in it which combined gives you more unfaked information. Your viewpoint doesn't change it's content every single frame. This only happens when you rotate super fast 180degree or warp through a portal or whatever.

chrisjj 2y ago
Actually 1deg is enough.
- dudegpus 2y ago
  It doesn't change completely. We take the information from the previous frame and now have more information than before as long as it's the same object we render

GrantMoyer 2y ago

All anti-aliasing techniques are essentially faking the effect of subsampling a higher resolution render. Temporal anti-aliasing is a pretty darn good anti-aliasing method, since it uses more real information than other methods except for (well implemented) brute force supersampling. It's also a little unique, since it can be tweaked to actually produce that intermediate higher resolution render, which is how we get temporal super resolution.

numpad0 2y ago

Grainy 60fps is better experience than choppy FHD, to both play and to deliver to consumers. Right now, GPU performance on lower end phones is a problem that both differentiates high end ARM chips from the rest, and is also harming app growths. 60fps on non-SD8 SoCs is going to sell more Play Store cards, and also co-incidentally more ARM licenses. Maybe it could also preemptively save Google Tensor before its public reputation points run out. Game players also gets better experience, but that's maybe entirely coincidental.

archagon 2y ago

FWIW, DLSS feels like magic. I get something like 50% perf improvement with almost no loss in fidelity. Lets me play modern games at 4k/120hz on my 3080 without too many problems.

sitkack 2y ago

TFA shows how much energy this saves.

kevingadd 2y ago

It's less a plateau and more scaling boundaries. Mobile chips especially are limited in power and die space so if you want to produce a high-resolution image at acceptable frame rates, either quality-per-pixel or pixel count have to drop compared to stuff that's plugged into the wall. Each generation of chip on desktop or mobile is still much faster than the previous, but that's battling with increased quality-per-pixel and higher screen resolutions/refresh rates. DLSS/XeSS allow dropping the pixel count and then reconstructing a satisfactory image, which means you can either cut power draw for near-equivalent quality, or use the newly available headroom to improve quality-per-pixel further or deliver higher framerates. One dirty secret when it comes to mobile phones and tablets is that games were already rendering below native resolution - Apple basically told developers to do this in the early Retina era, since it wasn't feasible to render at native with good framerates - since it saves power and the screens are so high-res that most users won't be able to tell the difference. I can't remember the last time I launched a game on my phone and it was actually rendering at native resolution. So in that context, techniques like FSR or this new upscaler are just replacing the existing bilinear/bicubic upscale filter.