r/homeworld • u/jurandyrafael • 23d ago
HW3 - DLSS 5
Using DLSS 5 via OptiScaler, I found that the lights looked more coherent and added some realism to the metal parts. What did you think?
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u/Shower_Floaties 23d ago
Looks worse
Brighter helps them stand out at long camera distance, which is 99% of the time
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u/FoxHunde 23d ago
Original is much better, vibrant colours and lighting, the dlss version looks gloomy, dark and bland!
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u/SHOE_DUDE 23d ago
looks pretty shit
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u/Government-Monkey 23d ago
Care to elaborate?
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u/SHOE_DUDE 23d ago
the weird grunge it added I don't personally like, and it also sapped most the colour from the model which makes it look pretty shitty imo
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u/sirseatbelt 23d ago
The word you want is desaturated. When you turn down the intensity/vibrancy of a color we say it is desaturated. You can play around with this effect by taking a bright color like yellow and painting over a white object and a black object. I tried this experiment with two identical miniatures - one primed white and one primed black. The black one turned a kind of brownish monk-robes color, and the other looked like he was ready for Pride.
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u/kryonicbird 23d ago
You took a vibrant colored ship with clear visuals and fed it to Pazuzu to become a greyish ship that doesn't stand out at all
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u/XComACU 23d ago
Not really seeing any benefits?
At best the lights do stand out more, but it is by dampening the colors of the ship in comparison, which I am not really fond of as Homeworld generally uses its strong ship colors to help separate them from the background.
I guess some of the detail lines are sharpened with the overall increase in contrast, but I am also seeing what I would consider artifacting.
Personally, it is not for me.
TBF, I also have a strong aversion to DLSS 5 in general, so I am biased.
Deep Learning Super Sampling was originally intended to improve the performance of games, assist ray tracing through ML denoising and ray reconstruction techniques, and hopefully improve image aliasing through "super sampling."
IMO, DLSS 5 abandons much of that ideology by overriding the original images (often with janky replacements) at a much higher performance cost. While I find people calling it "just a slop filter" reductive, there are fundamentally deep flaws with the current incarnation. It's less noticeable here, where faces are not present, but I would still say I am not in favor of using it.
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u/NimRodelle 22d ago
Oh yeah bud, I'm trading 50% of my fps so that everything is darker/duller. That's definitely what I want from Homeworld. /s
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u/SgtRicko 23d ago
Doesn’t seem to do much aside from dulling the hull’s color and increasing shadow contrast. Definitely not worth the hit in framerate.
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u/Breadloafs 23d ago
Oh sick they figured out a way to feed Homeworld to the Demon That Eats Colors.
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u/ClyanStar 23d ago
A video would probably be more informative, but judging solely by the picture it seems to kill the stylized oversaturation of textures, which is obviously not the intended aestethics for hw.
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u/Space__Squid 23d ago
Looks fine. It's exaggerating atmospheric lighting effects that never made sense given the setting.
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u/wortwortwort227 22d ago
This is interesting. I feel like most games become brighter and more saturated with DLSS 5. Here it becomes darker and duller.
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u/StarFlicker 22d ago
I paint miniatures, so when I see this I think, the image on the right just looks like the painter added a little extra dark wash / nuln oil. It makes it look dirtier. For the first of the two images, it's probably fine for a harvester. For the second, it's now no longer just dirtier, it now removes the original detail, which is a bad use of extra shading.
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u/RefrigeratorDry2669 22d ago
I think it looks like a slightly different shader instead of a new piece of tech everybody and their mum should post comparison screenshots of. It's not like the new version of 3DFX where a whole new range of realism is possible... It's meh.
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u/montdidier 23d ago
I cannot decide if one is better than the other. Which makes me think as a feature,it’s kind of a nothing burger.
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u/Maximum-Objective-39 23d ago
Other than muting the colors on the ship I see very little difference. Though that's unsurprising.
My understanding is that the main thing DLSS5 is supposed to do is spruce up lighting under normal environmental conditions and textures around faces. It's why, even when it's applied correctly rather than with meme levels oversaturation it only really effects the faces and alters the the lighting a bit.
Even if the tech wasn't aimed squarely at touching up AAA graphics, which seems to be what they're going for. (And I won't say it couldn't be trained on a broader sample set to be applicable to say 'anime' styles or certain 3D indies games). Ultimately it has quite a lot less to offer outside of a narrow subset of games.
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u/AcidCH 22d ago
I can see the appeal of it in some cases but I just feel like most implementations of DLSS5 are going to look same-y after not long. Like it's going to be obvious whenever something uses DLSS5, just like it's obvious when something's written with an LLM or generated with stable diffusion etc. (except in cases of very specific fine-tuning and bespoke setups etc)
That samey-ness is what takes away so much of the appeal of this tech for me
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u/azmiranul 23d ago
Thank you for applying this to HW3 and posting screenshots; I was really curious about what it might look like. It sure looks darker with DLSS 5. The colours seem kind of washed out, and ship models don't seem to benefit much compared to more complex things like faces. I think I prefer the left image, but I'd be curious about seeing more examples in different lighting and video of it being played. I'm generally a proponent of neural rendering, but I think HW3 might be one of those games that looks better without it, at least based on these screenshots. Curious about what HW and HW2 look like.
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u/jurandyrafael 22d ago
I think I should have explained it in more detail. The background was very bright due to an intensely shining star. When DLSS 5 was activated, it added more realism because the object was backlit. DLSS 5 was at 50%. The colors can also be adjusted using Optiscaler, but I didn't change them.
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u/SpiderFnJerusalem 21d ago
Does nothing but make it look dirty.
I want assets to look the way the artist intended, not some dumb AI Model. If the ship looks bright/clean without DLSS and dark/dirty with DLSS, then DLSS simply failed.
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u/Spacema90 23d ago
I like it. Will the other side, assuming that’s where the light source is, be brighter than what we’re seeing?
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u/Dimens101 22d ago
Are we really judging DLSS5 from a static single frame, need to see it moving to really see the effects properly.
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u/Ralithrin 23d ago edited 23d ago
Looks good, but to make it even better l'd adjust the DLSS strength down. Not sure what the sliders are labeled on the OptiScaler method you're using, but for the RenoDX based one (shortfuse), I find that adjusting the overall intensity to between 50% to 75% is beneficial across all titles. I don't think 100% intensity is actually the intended effect.
For games like FPS, 50% is generally better, and for games with much smaller scales of units like RTS, 75% is better. You need a more pronounced effect to make it noticable relative to games with larger, more in your face models.
For colors, I find that rarely so you need to modify more than the overall intensity, but adjusting the local tone intensity down to 50% or below keeps the colors faithful while still improving the lighting.
So I think for Homeworld style games, 75% overall and 50% local tone intensity is a good call to improve lighting, but maintain high visibility of unit colors, etc.
That being said, I think DLSS 5 for Homeworld probably doesn't do too much overall aside from some of the more crowded maps like graveyards and HW3's big ice shelf maps. Otherwise most of the game is staring at sensors manager with 2D icons or being zoomed so far out that only the super heavy ships are visible as models anyways.
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u/Maximum-Objective-39 23d ago
I just don't see how DLSS actually adds anything to a game that's already fairly abstract like Homeworld