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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

I completely agree with you. Also those people who complain about the "dull european" look, did you scroll down and look at the images altered using the Mapillary Vistas set?

The cool thing is that this gives game-designers an extremely powerful additional tool. You could for example easily go for a more retro-look by training with kodakcolor images ...

And I don't buy the argument that GTA doesn't look more realistic because that's what the designers were going for. If this was a game with a clear "comic appearance" that might be true, however I would argue it looks like it does, because the designers did the maximum that they could achieve with their tools and within a certain budget.

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I almost clicked away from the the article because those Cityscapes transformations looked worse in my opinion - just washed out and dull, so I can understand why people didn't like the look. The Mapillary Vistas processing definitely was nicer, although it looked uneven to me - the road still looked washed out, which created an almost disturbing level of contrast with the greenery.

What they've done is interesting, and I think with further refinement it is certainly a technique to consider.

Definitely; I mean if they had a dataset of the cities and locations GTAV was based on I think it might look uncanny.

I think expectations influenced by culture play a role here. Since I live in a Brazilian metropolis (4mi population), the Cityscapes transformations looked more real. That is probably because they look more like what I'm used to see when I walk the streets. People from rich neighborhoods in the US will likely find the Mapillary Vistas more realistic since that is what they used to see.

Impressive result nevertheless. Improving this with adversarial networks will probably generate images which are indistinguishable from reality in just a few years.

The color grade in GTA is of course an artistic choice and rendering the entire game with foggy overcast light and a strong green tinge (which btw. is not how German cities look, we aren't living in a bad color transfer of The Matrix) makes it look bad at the macro level. The details might be enhanced by this method, but honestly it's kind of hard to tell from a heavily compressed 720p Youtube video. What looks okay or even better in a video doesn't have to look better interactively, uncompressed, in native resolution.

Hot take: The overall tone of the style produced using this dataset comes from capture artifacts.

the only thing i could get out of the demo videos is that their fps is shit.

fps > beautiful images until you get at least 60... which this wasn't.

im pretty bearish on this kind of innovation in games tbh, its never going to be low latency enough to be viable, even if they'd improve their framerate - i dont see it going beyond academic interest because of that

definitely interesting to read about though, even if i doubt its viability in gaming

>its never going to be low latency enough to be viable Why is that? Just because it's expensive in terms of computation? I can't see why latency wouldn't improve with framerate.

It couldn't because of the nature of this technology.

Their post processing can only start after the full image has been rendered, so whatever photorealism filter they apply will necessarily delay the image until the process is finished.

This is not a fundamental obstacle for the technology. Lots of stuff is happening in post-processing already.

The Cityscapes transformations have a photorealism advantage because they're blurrier and more washed out. It's easier to match less detailed photos.

The blurriness, green tinge, and washed out colours are qualities photos sometimes have, but it's not what we see with our eyes. But they do help hide details that would give the image away as a computer rendering.

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