GOING DEEP

LEARNING Als are breaking PC gaming and rebuilding it in their own image

- Phil Iwaniuk

In the year of our lord Gaben 2023, Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR both offer an AI-driven means of running games at a higher resolution than your graphics card and monitor are actually outputting at. They’re both driven by fearsomely clever mathematics that’s analysed trillions of frames from the games they support, and learned to interpolate what the transition from one frame to the next looks like. They’ve learned every pixel’s most likely next move, even at 8K resolution.

They also have this in common, too: they both make your games look like they’ve been dipped in a vat of Vaseline. OK, fair enough – that’s a slightly harsh description. But AI resolution upscaling is generally used as a bit of a last resort at present. It’s something you fall back on when you realise you’re not going to hit a stable 60fps natively without turning down something absolutely vital in the graphics settings menu, like Elden Ring bear hairiness, or Total War: Warhammer III’s lizardmen scale reflection quality. And you didn’t fight in two world wars to play games on medium.

GLHF DLSS