Games

Okay, I ended up doing a bunch of research and writing and rewriting this comment a few times lol but I think we got to the bottom of it.

In the final analysis, I think what dlss 5 shows is that nvidia is betting on moving away from 'traditional' GPUs to tensor-architecture processing units, made especially for running AI models.

So what they would have is instead of rendering the ray-tracing, subsurface scattering, hair physics etc directly on the GPU all at once, they would have an AI model running on a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) to render it on the frame/geometry. This would give some breathing room back in computing power, if it pans out.

This would cement their status as a monopoly or near-monopoly in TPUs, but it would also bypass the bottleneck of current tech that's not scalable indefinitely. The 5090 is already pushing manufacturing capabilities. The new dlss does help performance, especially on TPUs if they go that way, but even on the GPU, compared to the same 'native' options.

This could work, but it's very early work. So how this will pan out in practice is still anyone's guess, it's too early to be sure that we'll just have to settle for TPUs and 'slop'.

Keep in mind nvidia is already the leader in GPUs, and games are made to their specifications for their hardware (for the most part). They're the ones who released physX, and then shelved it. They're the ones who make ray tracing and HDR that people can't run, and this is tech we already have. So I don't necessarily see the move to TPUs, if it even ends up happening, as wholly different to what we've been living with for 20+ years.

In my opinion this showcase was more of a developers' demo, though it seems I was right that nvidia engineers used the model on the games without going through the devs - the artists that worked on some of those games were surprised that their game was in the video. Engineers used an aggressive setting and capable devs could instead use it sparingly or the way they want it for their art direction. And others won't care and just press the 'enable everything' button.

However, the fact remains that most people won't be able to run it. They have announced that dlss 5 will initially run on a single 5090, which is just out of price and even if it was affordable, not everyone could use it. So they're sowing the seeds now, knowing that devs will end up using the SDK and thus get 'locked' into using nvidia - like they've been doing for the past 20 years of course.

If this pans out for nvidia hardware requirements will go down, and along with it the model will get expanded to allow for more usecases, like LORAs or fine-tuning on the devs' part to get it to look the way they want. In general with AI it's the same situation as Photoshop in its time - people don't know how to approach it at first and think it's taking away their intent, then they get comfortable with it and find ways they can still show intent even with different tools. Companies started making digital drawing surfaces etc. It'll be similar here, but in the final analysis what we see is capitalism doing its monopoly thing. I know it's a duh moment lol, but it's interesting seeing it play out perfectly from just a showcase video.

What will likely end up happening in the short-term is studios will use 'captured in-game (*with dlss 5)' disclaimers in their trailers, and they will include it in the game, but just like motion blur it's something people won't turn on, not that they could for at least a good few years lol. From my research I found that graphics are a big selling point, even when people won't be able to run the game at max settings. Of course we knew graphics sell, but it's interesting that it doesn't seem to matter if the customer will be able to run the graphics - they just like that it looks good, even if they know that they won't get these graphics out of it.

tl;dr: new paradigm shift that shakes up the market . but yeah the big takeaway is a complete shift from GPUs to TPUs, with all that entails.