"Democratizing photorealistic multiplayer gaming": Roblox is working on its own version of NVIDIA's reviled DLSS 5, and it's as AI-sloppy as you'd expect

Comparison of four landscape scenes illustrating rendering techniques. Top left: Vibrant Roblox render. Top right: Simplified 3D data. Bottom left: Lab results with moderate details. Bottom right: Enhanced Super Upsampler vision with rich colors and textures. — (Image credit: Roblox Corporation)

When NVIDIA first unveiled DLSS 5 with a shocking video, the reaction from PC gamers, developers, and general AI haters was overwhelmingly negative.

Touted as "the GPT moment for graphics" by NVIDIA's CEO and founder Jensen Huang, DLSS 5 is evidently capable of completely transforming your favorite game's graphics into something that resembles AI fan art.

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For rendering, cloud-based level of detail (LOD) and compositing systems generate high-fidelity assets delivered via a content delivery network (CDN). The Roblox Video Model (Super Upsampler) leverages rendered video and rich data model context to produce stochastic visuals and striking realism, operating on the edge for every player with optimal performance powered by cloud-edge GPU infrastructure. The rich Roblox client would then render this video feed and, in the future, optionally overlay a locally rendered upsampled avatar to maintain very low latency on foreground actions.
Anupam Singh, Senior VP of Engineering, Roblox

The most important thing to note here is that the Roblox team still hasn't achieved the desired results. Although it has provided several examples of what it imagines the process will look like, it's still working on making it a reality.

In several four-panel examples provided by the development team, we can see how the original Roblox render has its 3D data stripped out and sent to the new Super Upsampler to create more realistic visuals.

In the bottom-right corner of these examples, there's a "vision" frame that shows off what's going to be expected as an end result for Roblox Reality.

Introducing Roblox Reality - YouTube

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Why does Roblox want to add photorealistic AI upscaling?

Roblox is a game full of content that's largely created by its audience, and the company says that's exactly who they're targeting with this upgrade.

Roblox Reality represents a major step in democratizing creation, allowing any creator to build photorealistic games by leveraging the Roblox Game Engine and Video Model, significantly reducing the development time, cost, and compute that is traditionally required for high-fidelity graphics. This makes creating photorealistic games faster and more cost and compute efficient for our creators.
Anupam Singh, Senior VP of Engineering, Roblox

The developers admit that Roblox Reality is not yet ready for prime time, mostly due to issues with compute costs when scaling. Regardless, the team is hoping to launch the new feature later this year or early next year.

Windows Central's take

Announcing NVIDIA DLSS 5 | AI-Powered Breakthrough in Visual Fidelity for Games - YouTube

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As I've pointed out plenty of times in the past, the use of AI upscaling in gaming isn't going anywhere. If nothing else, it's only accelerating to the point where many gamers believe it's stepping over some unseen red line, turning handcrafted art into generic slop.

Although Roblox kind of feels like its own gaming world — I really don't have any experience with the game, but know that it's massively popular — I don't doubt that this is a hint as to what the future holds for plenty of other game studios.

Despite NVIDIA receiving a ton of blowback for its DLSS 5 introduction, the feature is still expected to arrive later this year. As I'm sure the kids would tell me, "The future is now, old man!"

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Cale Hunt brings to Windows Central more than nine years of experience writing about PC gaming, Windows laptops, accessories, and beyond. If it runs Windows or in some way complements the hardware, there’s a good chance he knows about it, has written about it, or is already busy testing it.