Neural rendering will overcome “the limitations of today’s graphics” says Nvidia’s Bryan Catanzaro
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It’s no secret that Nvidia is putting a ton of resources into Artificial Intelligence – not just when it comes to its money-making AI chips for servers, but its most recent GeForce graphics cards too. The release of the RTX 50 series kicks off with the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 at the end of the month, and there’s a lot to learn about these enthusiast GPUs.
Most recently, Nvidia’s Bryan Catanzaro has been discussing all there is to know about its new DLSS 4 and Multi Frame Generation technology, the latter of which is exclusive to the 50 series. It has been boosting performance tremendously, with the 5090 offering double the FPS of the 4090 in Cyberpunk 2077. However, there are still a few days to go before we can see the ‘real’ performance from rasterization uplift alone.
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Nvidia is leading the shift to AI-powered graphics
Not everyone is on board with what seems like a reliance on AI for the latest RTX graphics cards. With the 40 series, the unveiling of frame generation was a major step forward, though it certainly shouldn’t exist to reach 60 FPS. However, when used correctly to boost performance far beyond what is currently possible with pure rasterization at native resolution, we think it shines.
As per a recent interview with Digital Foundry – which revealed that frame gen on the RTX 30 series hasn’t been ruled out yet, and that frame gen is definitely needed to get to 1000Hz, Catanzaro had a lot to say about what he calls “top-down generated graphics”. We’ve touched on this before, and he makes it clear that AI-powered Neural rendering is the key to overcoming the limits of traditional rendering (something he refers to as “bottom-up rendering”).
“I’m very excited about the prospects of overcoming a lot of the limitations of today’s graphics which I think are really difficult to scale. The more fidelity to we put into bottom-up simulation, the more work we have to do to capture textures and geometry and then animate it. It becomes very expensive and really challenging. There’s a lot of graphics that’s really held back because we just don’t have the artist bandwidth; we don’t have the time or the storage to really save all that”
Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President of Applied Deep Learning Research at Nvidia
With traditional rendering, “you’re trying to model every fuzzy hair and every snowflake and every drop of water and every light photon so that we can simulate reality”. As you may have guessed, this gets very resource-expensive. As such, graphics are “making a shift” away from that style of rendering explicitly, and Nvidia is at the forefront of that with Neural networks, AI generation, and prediction. Neural networks will be able to curate all of this information without the need to render it from scratch as you would do traditionally, giving AI plenty enough context to take over.
As he eloquently puts it: “when a painter paints a scene, they’re not actually simulating every photon and every facet of every piece of geometry” – they just already know what it is supposed to look like. With AI at hand to generate graphics in a much more efficient way, this is the vision that Nvidia has for the future of graphics – and it is already demonstrating it.