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Comment by larschdk | Hacker News Reader

Impressive, but I think that photorealism is not necessarily what you would want to strive for in games, as it is not true realism. It emulates the deficiencies of the camera that we perceive it as realistic, because we are trained on thousands of photo images and video footage. I prefer visionrealism instead of photorealism in my games and don't really find that lens effects like flares, chromatic aberration, and depth of field enhances the experience of realism. It feels like I'm looking through a camera rather than being there myself. For me it breaks immersion instead of enhancing it.

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I found their approach to be more like the difference between a digitally filmed movie (that can look too crisp) and one shot on cellulose that has a kind of softness to it.

Where it noticeably fell short was displaying red lights (tail lights, traffic lights, etc) that lost their brightness.

yeah, games visuals are more about art direction than search of realism

this would work great in a flight sim tho, albeit blur and out of focus effects are terrible for visual clarity

however, there's one small bit that has not been given enough attention imho, which is on the latter set, under "removes distant haze": this would be a great technique to complement flat LOD reduction of open world games while keeping up the crispness and contrast of distant items.

That's mostly a problem with the input data. A gamestudio of the size of rockstar could afford to acquire their own custom fit dataset.

Get some good cameras and lenses and capture footage of wherever they want to set their next game. Then they can apply some motion picture color grading to that and use that as the input data for the NN.

I think photorealism has the advantage of maintaining a cinematic feel. You can do a lot of 'realistic' things withs light in a game, that aren't really realistic (you'd never see them in real life), but are the type of thing you'd see in a photo or movie. This allows for a more tightly controlled experience.

Of course, this all depends on what the intention behind the game is. If you do want maximum immmersion, visionrealism would be the way to go.

I don't think you could be any more wrong.

Enhancements like this are going to be the thing that brings VR fully into the mainstream. It will be industry-changing.

This tech is in its infancy. I promise you, the final result is going to be indistinguishable from human vison.

Looking like a photo is quite distinguishable from human vision.

This could extend beyond games easily. I can see adoption from animation studios for eg.

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