I hate upscalers, even DLSS. I also hate almost all Temporal solutions except my tweaked TAAU and I still wouldn’t use it if Lumen wasn’t dependent on temporal solutions to hide its horrid artifacts (I would use high quality SMAA or slightly sharpened FXAA or crispy no AA).
These stupid looking, blurry as crap temporal methods are ruin raytracing and gaming for me.
Summary
Make no mistake, I believe the 30 series and any AMD/Intel equivalent competitors are the current gen for gaming. 1080p for 3060, 1440 for 3070, 4k on 3080, Plugin competitor’s vendors, etc. I think 30fps is unacceptable trash in this day and age and 60fps is a gold standard for a reason.
Take an amazing looking pre-dlss-days game. The 3060(a 1080p card) could run it at 4k 60fps and 144+fps at 1080p. This is because we had more innovative productions and development features.
Now games can barely run 50-60fps at 1080p on the 3060. I’m losing more than half of my performance for next gen games that barly look any better(exclude GI games)? WTF?!
This new trend in non-optimal, inefficient computing in games came from so called “innovations”(mistakes) like dlss and heavy procedural content design feautures. Lazy developers ask the majority of people(1080p players) to upscaling from an extremely crappy resolution like 540p or 720p.
An example of heavy procedural content design would be something like GI which is well worth it since it actually looks amazing in a dynamic scene. GI isn’t just easier/more simple way to light digital scenes.
But a bigger one is Nanite.
“No work being put into LODs and import extremely high poly meshes”
Okay but Nanite clearly doesn’t offer better performance than optimized, maybe lower poly mesh with LODS. You will never eliminate “pop in” because of world partitioning, shadow pop, and foliage culling. (All still present in FN 5.1). Importing those meshes would be cool but If I could trade in more traditinal (high) performance for pop in, I would.
Higher resolution textures are far cheaper than Nanite meshes and can still provide photorealistic results to regular lower poly meshes. The best way to optimize with 8k textures is to make sure it’s kept extremely small so you’re procedurally tiling the textures/UV correctly on the mesh to save VRAM.
Another thing about lower LODs with higher quality textures is they don’t break shadows like usual Nanite meshes so you can use regular shadows instead of VSMs. When you chop out Nanite, you can easily get to that native resolution your GPU card targets at a 60fps gold standard with great, photorealistic looking visuals with something like heavily scaled down Lumen or hopefully Intel’s new path tracing solution
Lumen can’t even run on integrated graphics. And any solution that can run on igpus will be extremely cheap on GPU cards so no blurry or ghosting upscaling should have to be used with that PT solution.
We need to move AWAY from upscalers. I get rendering smarter not harder which is what temporal solutions offer, but not if it looks like blurry **** . One step forward, two steps back.
Be dynamic, look photorealistic, compute fast, and look stable. That is real computer innovation.
I’m not suprised Intel is taking the first step in that future.