NVIDIA said native resolution no longer matters in games – AI upscaling is the future

The YouTube channel of the Digital Foundry portal has published an interesting video in which Jakub Knapik from CD Projekt Red and Jacob Freeman and Bryan Catanzaro from NVIDIA discuss the implementation of DLSS 3.5 technology in the game Cyberpunk 2077, also pointing out its general advantages embrace AI-powered scaling and rendering.

Image source: cyberpunk.net

Specifically, Brian Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research at NVIDIA, said that running a game at its native resolution should no longer be viewed as a guarantee of the most detailed graphics. An expert believes that the game graphics industry is increasingly relying on AI image reconstruction and AI-based rendering. Since then, increasing graphics details using a brute force method is no longer an optimal solution “Moore’s Law is dead”. This means that there is a growing need for the introduction of intelligent technologies in the DLSS format – they will help increase the level of detail and bypass the increasingly less significant performance increase as we move from generation to generation of modern graphics systems.

Regarding Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red’s Jakub Knapik explained that implementing path tracing would not have been possible without DLSS solutions – especially in image scaling and frame generation. DLSS technology helped increase the performance margin of GPUs, and Cyberpunk 2077 received credible real-time lighting simulations that would have been impossible with traditional rendering.

Brian Catanzaro is confident that AI upscaling technologies in game graphics will eventually be able to completely replace traditional rendering. The industry has realized that with the help of large data sets that are used to train AI, they can achieve more than creating algorithms from scratch, i.e. with conventional rendering methods, says the expert.

It seems that the gaming world as we know it is a thing of the past. If Moore’s Law loses its relevance, AI algorithms could actually be the only guarantee for the further development of three-dimensional graphics. And for NVIDIA at least, developing AI subsystems in future graphics cards could be a priority.

Further details on the use of DLSS 3.5 and other visual innovations added to Cyberpunk 2077 with the major patch 2.0 can be found in a separate article.