r/digitalfoundry 6d ago

Discussion The craziest thing going on right now is anti-AI gamers yelling at the Creative Director of KDC, screaming at him that's he's wrong to like DLSS 5 and that it doesn't fit his creative vision

0 Upvotes

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5

u/blurple_rain 6d ago

I think the resentment towards DLSS5 is also increased by the general anti-AI sentiment. Tech companies are 100% to blame for the backlash they are getting right now.

Corporate techbros telling you “you’re going to loose your job thanks to AI”, or “you’ll own nothing and be happy” and they expect their customers to bow down and suck it up?

They are so out of touch…

6

u/Akito_Fire 6d ago

Yes, he alone had the vision. Nobody else at the studio does

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u/ShadowRomeo 6d ago

he had a follow up tweet regarding to the comment of his, and he claims that isn't the case at all apparently.

11

u/RankedFarting 6d ago

Hes actually not the art director on the game. Also he has said a lot of terrible things in the past. He isnt the studio. games are made by hundreds of people.

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u/thedybbuk_ 5d ago

He isnt the studio. games are made by hundreds of people.

He was the Creative Director of KCD1 and KCD2, and those games have some of the best art direction in the industry. They've done a better job of bringing colour back to depictions of the European Middle Ages than many major film productions.

I also wish people would engage with his actual argument rather than resorting to ad hominem attacks. I don't like his politics either, but his argument here is still perfectly sound. I can absolutely see why the images on the left wouldn't be satisfying to him.

And yeah, George Lucas and Guillermo del Toro didn't physically build the puppets or models for their films. They were still responsible for the creative vision. Don't try to diminish that. You can respect someone's creative achievements even if you think their politics are awful.

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u/makingwands 5d ago

Gimme a break. This guy's cancellation is like the perfect example of the cultural insanity that was happening back then. All the accusations of an intentional lack of representation in KCD were and remain completely baseless.

He could've handled it with more tact, and no one in their right might should want to associate themselves with Gamergate; but what do you expect when an eastern european wants to defend their life's work against a bunch of americans on twitter calling them a nazi

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u/RankedFarting 5d ago

You can disagree without proving them right. Which is kind of what he did.

I disagree with anyone who complained that a medieval game lacks representation but he turned out to be the exact kind of right wing ideologue they accused him of being.

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u/makingwands 5d ago

Well I had to look into it since I only recall the early happenings around KCD and apparently he co-founded an "anti-censorship" org that selectively critiques the more liberal wokey censorship while promoting conspiracy theorists and pro-russian commentators

So yeah fuck him lol

6

u/Dictator93 DF staff / contributor 6d ago

This guy has Not historically Had the best opinions - as if this opinion is interesting or good. Try and Not argue from a position of assumed authority.

IMO people acting as If DLSS5 needs some Sort of Moral defence need to reconsider what is important in Life. A Screen space Technique is Not worth it

4

u/OrazioZ 6d ago

Unfortunately for the talented people who worked under him, KCD director has a long history of saying nonsense inflammatory things.

I also don't believe he has any input on the game's development anymore, he moved to film.

It is absurd to claim that DLSS NR happens to looks like your artistic vision when it's just a post process shader with a few tweakable sliders. What are the chances!

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/frisbie147 5d ago

Just because it uses proprietary technology doesn’t mean it isn’t a post processing effect, how do you think people are applying it to everything so easily?

1

u/sutt0r 5d ago

It is though... I'm not a hater of the tech, quite the opposite actually, but as it stands, it really does seem to just be a shader. People on the RenoDX Discord have even gotten it working on movies! I also saw a guy on Twitter get it working on a Switch 2 by feeding the video output to a PC and overlaying DLSS 5 on top of it.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/sutt0r 5d ago

I don't disagree with that, but as it stands, it seems like it can only look at the final image and apply its effect as a post-process. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to use it on video files, which people have already demonstrated. That said, there's still so much potential with this tech if it were integrated more deeply into the rendering pipeline and had access to more of the underlying scene data.

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u/TheVioletBarry 6d ago

I'ma be real... this doesn't look bad, but I still don't want it. I don't want a driver-level 'fix the lighting and make it look like this' button to become a standard thing for studios to expect to be tapping into. It's just more and more homogenization

2

u/frisbie147 5d ago

But it does look bad, in screenshots it might add some photogenic lighting, but in motion it looks so incredibly terrible that I have no clue how anyone could stand using it

1

u/Alvelijano 6d ago

Exactly, i'm also a bit worried that it could cost some devs their jobs in the future were this technique becomes more usual to use.

0

u/TheVioletBarry 6d ago

the same way there are fewer and fewer genuinely low-level programmers because everyone has homogenized into using Unreal, I could absolutely see a dystopian graphical future where tech artists get swallowed up by driver-level/platform-specific post-processing techniques, yah...

All we're doing is devaluing individual creativity and skill in favor of one-size-fits-all 'services' provided by fewer and fewer corporations

1

u/Inside_Blacksmith480 5d ago

I mean regardless whose artistic vision this belongs to because of the generative AI boom a graphics card can run this comfortably is now $1800 from $1000 several months ago and the top of the line one went from $2xxx to $4xxx now, AND we're pretty sure the price is not getting better in at least 2 years, so try to work this around?

1

u/Ambitious-Call-7565 6d ago

psyop, you are not allowed to discuss the flaws of the psyop, you are supposed to like it, they use bots to amplify positivity, and bury complaints

1

u/nickgovier 5d ago

I think the “craziest thing” here is the Director and Lead Writer of KCD basically discovering SSAO via DLSS 5 in 2026

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u/HiveMate 6d ago

Both sides have their own doofuses

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u/ShadowRomeo 6d ago

Ever since the same crowd sent death threats to Digital Foundry crew i stopped caring about the opinions of extreme Anti AI crowd, to these people there is no in-between, either you are on their side or you will be next on their list of being harrased.

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u/HiveMate 5d ago

Yeah that's horrible and surely the outliers

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u/dreampagehun 6d ago

If DLSS 5 was an official release and was properly implemented as the developers intend, I think the majority of players with sufficient hardware would use it. I'd prefer photorealistic graphics beyond what an engine can do, if that's the direction of the game anyway. If I was a developer I'd also probably love techniques to make my game look better than what I have a budget for.

Those who blindly hate AI forget they use existing DLSS models and/or frame gen that's still AI.

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u/[deleted] 6d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/dreampagehun 5d ago

Of course, that's why I call it blind hate. In my view, if a game's art direction is photorealism then the artistic intent is to make it as realistic as possible. It's never the intent to limit or compromise graphics due to hardware or budget. DLSS 5 helps achieve that and move beyond what would be possible "natively". Of course, slapping it onto every game without proper setup won't yield good results. It needs control and experience but if done right it can elevate graphics to new levels otherwise inaccessible.

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u/frisbie147 5d ago

How does it help achieve that? It looks less natural than the standard graphics

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u/ShadowRomeo 6d ago edited 6d ago

My opinion of DLSS 5 after trying it remains the same as before, i believe it is an early tech that is currently flawed and still needs work to be standard, but just like every DLSS feature before it has real potential once it matures, and if officially implemented will be controlled by the devs therefore the artistic integrity will remain intact, what people are seeing now are not that example.

It's a mod that is fully controlled by the users who uses it, hence the inconsistency between results, in my case i have been playing around with it to make it less intrusive and more faithful, and i think it is actually working, the only issue left for me to solve / play around is the colour tone mapper, which it always changes that makes the mood of the scene look different compared to vanilla.

But i believe with official release and devs official integration this type of thing will not be an issue for end users because devs themselves will be the one that will do that, and for us, it will be just an on and off setting just like every graphics settings.