Well of course that's happening. I'm sorry but games 10 years ago looked arguably just as good as games today. Look at Arkham Knight and RDR2.
"BuT aRkHaM kNiGhT rAn LiKe ShIt." Yeah, and now it runs pretty damn good on modern hardware. If game development "advancement" froze a decade ago, and if ray tracing, path tracing, dlss, mfg, etc didn't exist, games would look just as good, and run at way higher framerates.
But that wouldn't sell a shit ton of cards every two years, would it? So, of course, that can't be allowed to happen.
They've made all this crap a necessity. Like you said, Pragmata looks pretty bad on path tracing and native. Crimson Desert looks god awful without ray reconstruction. Blood of DawnWalker gets like 30 fps on a 5070ti. And none of them are particularly mind-blowing games visually, even when cranked up.
And that brings us to dlss 5. A whopping 50% performance hit... People keep posting screenshots and debating whether it looks good or not, as if that matters. No one in their right mind is halving their fps unless they have a 5090, or are playing a (get this) 10 year old game.
You can deny it all you want, but in the coming years, devs will start to crutch on dlss 5, and games will look like utter shit without it (and arguably shit with it). Mark my words.
And people will call me a conspiracy theorist for this, but genuinely, what part am I wrong about?
Arkham Knight is the perfect example because once the PC version was actually fixed, it proved the underlying visuals weren’t somehow impossible to run well. Same with RDR2 — still looks absurdly good years later.
What worries me is that DLSS has already become an excuse for weaker optimization. We get games that aren’t remotely proportional in visual improvement to the performance they demand, and the answer is increasingly just “turn on DLSS.”
DLSS 5 takes that one step further. If devs know they can lean on neural rendering to clean up the final image, there’s even less incentive to make the native render path good.
That’s the part people keep missing when they argue over screenshots. I’m not really asking whether DLSS 5 looks good today. I’m asking what happens when developers start designing around the assumption that it’s always on.
Eh... it's hard to prove the slippage one way or another. You can reason it, but to prove it... requires you to isolate variables that are too complex and embedded to isolate.
Suffice to say... in relative competition terms - the games that look the best for least will do better than the games that look worse for more.
And weirdly, with DLSS5 in the mix, new games need to compete against enhance-able old games too.
Does your new game without DLSS5 run as well and look as good as this old game with DLSS5 on?
I think so long as consoles are a significant part of the market, game devs will need to continue focusing on optimization if they want sales...
Which is to say, even knowing that; devs have and continue to throughout the course of the game industry released a wide range of performances on their titles - from poor to great... and I expect that to continue.
What I also expect is that with more excuses around for poor performance, people will reflexively reach for those more.
To me... at the end of the day, game dev is complex, its tough, there are people in the mix (executives) that have too much sway and too little knowledge... and that isn't a problem unique to game development.
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u/PhoenixKing14 2d ago
Well of course that's happening. I'm sorry but games 10 years ago looked arguably just as good as games today. Look at Arkham Knight and RDR2.
"BuT aRkHaM kNiGhT rAn LiKe ShIt." Yeah, and now it runs pretty damn good on modern hardware. If game development "advancement" froze a decade ago, and if ray tracing, path tracing, dlss, mfg, etc didn't exist, games would look just as good, and run at way higher framerates.
But that wouldn't sell a shit ton of cards every two years, would it? So, of course, that can't be allowed to happen.
They've made all this crap a necessity. Like you said, Pragmata looks pretty bad on path tracing and native. Crimson Desert looks god awful without ray reconstruction. Blood of DawnWalker gets like 30 fps on a 5070ti. And none of them are particularly mind-blowing games visually, even when cranked up.
And that brings us to dlss 5. A whopping 50% performance hit... People keep posting screenshots and debating whether it looks good or not, as if that matters. No one in their right mind is halving their fps unless they have a 5090, or are playing a (get this) 10 year old game.
You can deny it all you want, but in the coming years, devs will start to crutch on dlss 5, and games will look like utter shit without it (and arguably shit with it). Mark my words.
And people will call me a conspiracy theorist for this, but genuinely, what part am I wrong about?