What can you tell us, if anything, about DLSS or FSR at some point, any point in development?
TL;DRDLSS or FSR support is a top rendering priority after Gen 12 is finished, most likely supporting both, but Brown promises no timeline and notes in-world UI will make implementation awkward.
Upscaling is a very common feature now. Every single console game pretty much uses it. A huge percentage of the AAA PC games use it. I don't want to say it's the future, but it's the current; this is the expected way if you want extreme resolutions unless you have the fastest graphics card. Even when you do, there's actually reasons that DLSS and FSR can exceed the quality of native resolution in many scenarios. There are compromises sometimes, there's artifacts in some situations, but on a stable frame you can actually get higher quality, because it actually supersamples the image beyond the number of pixels you actually have. So it's like a perfect anti-aliased image, or it can theoretically achieve a perfect anti-aliased image, which a native render cannot. So they're definitely the future, or in the next few years, the way to get to 4K and beyond. In terms of implementation, we need to just finish Gen 12 first. There's no point. By far the biggest performance improvement is the CPU gains we need to make from Gen 12. DLSS and FSR or an equivalent are top of the list. We have lots of other work related to the PU and Squadron that we need to get on with, but in terms of general render improvements, these are top of the list. So yeah, definitely. Like I said last time, though, I'm not going to promise one over the other, or timelines for them, or whether we even come up with our own one. Epic came up with their own one that is more similar to a hybrid of the two. Who knows? But the existing APIs for DLSS and FSR are theoretically going to be easier to implement than rolling your own one. So that's the most likely scenario, and most likely would be to support both. But we have to see when we get to it. And one thing that makes them a little bit awkward to implement in our engine is that traditionally you render your scene, you upscale it to 4K or whatever, and then you render the UI on top of that. However, our UI is very much in the world in a lot of cases. We have holograms in the world. We have MFDs on ships. We have floating holograms, holographic displays in the ships as well, mobiGlas, all these things. So they're not a flat 2D image projected on top of the render. They're actually part of the world. Which makes it problematic, because if you try and upscale very intricate text and UI, these algorithms tend to destroy it and do some evil things to what you really want to be crystal clear. So we already have a solution which splits our rendering so that certain parts of the UI, when they get to a certain size on screen or distance, swap to a different mode that renders them and makes sure that the post effects don't interfere with them. So we're hoping we can capitalize on that and use the same technique, so we can do FSR or DLSS on the main portion of the scene, and some objects get removed from that and composited on top. But that does make some things complicated for us. So that's a little bit like, ooh, we have to see how it's going to work. It probably won't be bug free in that sense. We'll have to tweak that till we get it right. But yeah, it's definitely something we need. Upscaling, for the vast majority of our users, I see as the common route. Some people want to have native, but I think once people have it, especially once they have the CPU gains, which you need, once you've got CPU gains and you can get 60, and you're like, oh, I can either have native 30 FPS or I can have upscaled 60 FPS, it might be an easier choice once they see it.