How’s this for a crossover episode? Alex Battaglia recently hosted a roundtable discussion on AI and the future of game graphics, sharing the stage with representatives from GPU maker Nvidia, Cyberpunk 2077 developers CD Projekt RED and the PCMR subreddit. The talk comes on the eve of the release of Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 and the game’s Phantom Liberty expansion, featuring a newly expanded range of technologies including DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction.
It’s a fascinating chat well worth watching in full via the embedded video below, but I’d like to dig into one aspect of the conversation that I found particularly interesting: the idea that while image upscaling and frame generation techniques could be seen as crutches used by developers to ignore optimisation work, but viewed another way they are tools that allow visuals to reach heights that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
Jakub Knapik of CDPR makes the point quite eloquently by comparing Cyberpunk’s path-traced graphics with that of Big Hero 6, the 2014 release that was one of the first path-traced animated films – and another project that renders a dense cityscape in many of its scenes. Rendering each frame of the movie took several hours, but less than a decade later, consumer graphics cards are able to render a scene within roughly the same ballpark of graphical complexity in Cyberpunk 2077 at 60 frames per second.
