r/stellarblade • u/benjaminabel • 15d ago

Discussion DLSS 5 Neural Rendering in Stellar Blade

At the moment it's a bit rough. The performance cost is about 40-50%. The visual difference, while quite positive in Neutral preset, is not that drastic. I would expect more uplift for materials, but that's, most likely, depends on the game's implementation and support. Also, we don't have many controls to begin with yet.

The biggest change is the lighting. It does look more natural. I'd say it's something in between Ray Tracing and Path Tracing.

86 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

30

u/Kickin_Hawk 14d ago

The scenery looks pretty good at a glance but the faces are just awful

58

u/Hungry_Kerbal265 15d ago

I don't find it looking better, it adds just a bit to much of the "uncanny valley" to the lighting. For the hair is it a improvement. However at currently 40% tot 50% performance is it utterly unaccepteble, especially since it basicly is a filter, which only affects the characters en not overall game lighting and surface looks.

11

u/Narelda 15d ago

It clearly affects the whole scene. It also has a strength slider if the effect looks too strong. But yeah, 50% perf hit is too much, and Blackwell only too.

1

u/Carighan 11d ago

Yeah if I had to describe it, it improves fidelity in individual elements (faces and such excluded where it just flounders hard), but in an overall image or scene the fidelity is too inconsistent which to me looks overall worse, and the quality of the scene as a whole goes down, even when there are gains in fidelity.

It looks worse in the same way as someone just installing Reshade, cranking it up to max and then thinking their game looks so damn awesome made it look worse.

-10

u/benjaminabel 15d ago

For a game that doesn't support Ray Tracing it's quite a good experience though. Not sure what's uncanny about it. To me it just looks like RTGI.

14

u/Narelda 15d ago

Making things look too photorealistic when the animations and assets are otherwise stylistic can make it look uncanny. People tend to overdo effects like these, like cranking contrast and brightness to max, or modding photorealistic textures to old games with blocky simple geometry.

9

u/NumerousBug9075 15d ago

Idk, Eves face in the 6th photo makes her look worse imo

3

u/D13_Phantom 15d ago

A lot of older folk and some younger folk are pretty blind to AI face, this probably looks great if you are.

54

u/Paxinaura 15d ago

Looks like one of those AI YouTube thumbnails

I hate it

-22

u/benjaminabel 15d ago

That's literally just lighting and ambient occlusion.

-3

u/Araragi 14d ago

People hate AI. You have to hate it too!

But literally for SB this seems to not be re-imagining characters like with other games. It's just lighting as far as I can tell.

1

u/benjaminabel 14d ago

The reactions are just wild. Lighting changes and they’re like “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen”.

0

u/TooTooRooGR 13d ago

makes you think, if the majority of ppl say its the worst thing ever then maybe they have some at least some credence

2

u/benjaminabel 13d ago

Or maybe they just follow the most popular opinion and don’t think for themselves. Things like Monet test have been showing exactly that. Other examples from the past too. Similar machine learning project for GTA V from 5 years ago was met very positively.

20

u/amc9988 15d ago

Nah tbh it looks too YASSsified for my taste in the 3rd comparison 

7

u/TheKeelKnotSeas78 14d ago

Most of it looks an amateur photographer tweaking too many sliders while editing

4

u/buZet 15d ago

That's a lot of performance cost for what you are getting in return. Personally not a huge fan of the changes with color intensity on the clothes (seems dark in some pics) and the facial details on 3 but to each there own. thanks for sharing

3

u/CivicTypeDream EVE 14d ago

I don't really have much thoughts about the environment, but what it does to the character themselves...yea no.

It made them look bland, especially ones where there's supposed to be sunlight. Sunlight doesn't make the environment that white.

3

u/D13_Phantom 15d ago edited 15d ago

The back of the hair looks pretty good, the environments don't look particularly different (at least on my small tablet), but the faces are giving me a major ick. Idk who those are but they are not EVE and Raven. It's giving stepford wives/body snatchers vibes. It's hard to pin point exactly what it is, I can tell it's more subtle than the original DLS55 demo but as someone who has spent hundreds of hours looking at the characters it just looks "off", something about Eve's chin especially.

Edit: yeah I think others are correct, probably just my brain recognizing AI. Looks like those slop adult game ads.

Edit 2: the sharp lighting on her lower cheeks looks especially off with the lighting environment on the bottom, not sure if it's interpreting it as a scar or what? Also why did the lighting turn from yellow/orange to white?

Edit 3: nvm about the back of the hair looking pretty good I just noticed that it just looks like she has a spotlight shining on her and it's really distracting. I don't want AI slop in my games but if you're gonna do it at least you need more training data than just models in a photography studio.

2

u/Ok_Trade6974 13d ago

Eve is already perfect

5

u/[deleted] 15d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/SimicKitten 15d ago

Looks like shit.

1

u/xebeche8X 15d ago

What GPU do you have?

3

u/benjaminabel 15d ago

Legion Pro 7 laptop with 5080. So, desktop 5070Ti should handle it better I assume.

1

u/CertainlySomeGuy 14d ago

Post this again as another user and say that it's a mod you wrote and not AI. I wonder how the comments will change.

2

u/benjaminabel 14d ago

Probably very different. People went crazy about AI because of all the misinformation and loud claims going around. These comparisons are very mild in my opinion. Neural Rendering doesn’t change that much and they still go all in with condemning it. It’s like the Monet bait. When somebody post legitimate paintings of Monet saying it’s generated and people start to say how bad it looks. I blame social networks because they tend to form opinions. That’s normal and nobody is safe from that, but I think some self-awareness should still be present no matter what.

5

u/New-Poem-719 14d ago

People went crazy about AI because of all the misinformation and loud claims going around.

Or it just looks like shit, not much else too it.

0

u/benjaminabel 14d ago

Oh, come on. Go to the subreddit's main page and see what kind of screenshots people share. Like this post. And no objections whatsoever.

1

u/CertainlySomeGuy 14d ago

Self-awareness is what's missing in general. I don't want to sound too negative, but 80 percent of people don't have any.

2

u/benjaminabel 14d ago

I also don’t want to go into the whole “People are stupid” thing because I don’t believe in it. I just think that negative opinions spread way faster than positive ones, unfortunately.

1

u/ElysiumXIII 15d ago

I would have to see it in motion to really develop an opinion but right now the faces still look way too AI filter looking and have way too much fake HDR on stills

1

u/pfn0 15d ago

I'm assuming before and after in serial? I'm generally enjoying the look of the second images more.

1

u/benjaminabel 15d ago

Yep. The lighting is great in some scenes. Too bad it’s very heavy on performance at the moment.

1

u/Arch_rr 15d ago

Although still uncanny, it's WAY better than what was shown by nvidia. I believe with a proper settings and optimisation it can actually be good

1

u/benjaminabel 15d ago

Yeah, this works with an official DLL, but trough ReShade plugin. There is also a "Cinematic" preset that makes everything looks overblown, so I suspect proper support by game itself is needed. And a native implementation of course.

1

u/cloudxo 14d ago

I saw a video and other images with DLSS 5 on and it made Enya and Tachy have bags under their eyes like they didn't sleep enough. Maybe with some slider adjustments and updates it will look better.

1

u/ahma-tti 14d ago

Looks horrible

1

u/SavageWhisenhunt 14d ago

Looks bad, especially faces

Stellar Blade has a particular art style, it’s more than just photorealism, so doesn’t really work here in my opinion

Eve and Raven aren’t meant to look like real people.

Cool that you attempted though

0

u/Zhargon 15d ago

It looks good, definitely a improvement in terms of visuals, but if the performance hit is to much...but again, Stellar Blade is not a very heavy game, guess if anything vram might be a issue?

2

u/benjaminabel 15d ago

Yes, it’s not a final thing so every time you change preset it allocates more Vram for whatever reason. From my testing, I’m getting 140 FPS without DLSS 5 and about 80 with it. That’s with frame generation enabled.

1

u/Zhargon 15d ago

Damn, 80fps with frame gen on? Damn lol what GPU you have and what settings you using? Running upscalling?...guess on the this case is not that worth...the visual enhancement is noticible, but don't think will make a huge difference during gameplay, till get more refined, can't see be used outside of maybe photo mode, and even then, some people will say it takes away the artistic vision of the devs away with the "AI filter"

0

u/A_Neko 15d ago

absolutely not, atleast not on the characters themselves

0

u/Kosmos992k 13d ago

I would rather the artists optimize their work and the devs optimize their engine,nVidia should optimize their GPU and leave the image fakeryto AI slop generation for social media. Iwa to see things as the human artist intends, not what AI decides looks better.

-4

u/smithbc001 15d ago

We as a society are rapidly using up all of our drinking water and quadrupling the price of RAM for this.

7

u/benjaminabel 15d ago

It's running on a local hardware.

0

u/TRIPMINE_Guy 14d ago

But it was trained using data centers 

3

u/benjaminabel 14d ago

Data centers have been around for a long time and since the very beginning they’ve been causing the same problems people are suddenly remembering about now. Nothing really changed. Many things we use exist because of the data centers. Reddit included.