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Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't get why all the popular upscaling methods (DLSS, FSR, XeSS, ...) aren't integrated in all of the mainstream engines: Unity, Unreal, Godot...

As far as I'm concerned, on the end of a game developer, that should be a single checkbox in the project options, or something similarly easy to choosing between 2X and 4X AA, both on the desktop and mobile, where supported by the hardware (or simpler generic upscaling, if nothing else suffices).

The performance gains (at the expense of graphical fidelity, which may or may not be acceptable) would be staggering - you could quite literally squeeze out just enough performance to enjoy a game or an application even from older generation hardware for more modern titles.

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Microsoft is pushing something along those lines with DirectSR, the idea is that game engines integrate one set of generic hooks which can then be routed to any of the vendor upscalers transparently.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directsr-preview/

If it's done well, then that sounds exactly like what we need! Wonder whether something similar will land in Vulkan too, at some point.

Because devs find them far less attractive in practice than the sales pitch implies.

I'd guess that a lot of devs it's not their main strength and their main concern is getting a working product out the door. If you're making "Bunnies go berserk" with the adventures of berserk rabbits as your main selling point, it seems unlikely that a smaller list of graphics fidelity options is going to dissuade anyone but the most hardcore graphics enthusiast from buying.

All those options are also going to need time allocated for a graphics developer to tune to suit your game if the out-of-the-box defaults aren't great, and as it's an area still in progress upgrading APIs and revalidating for your game on a range of hardware. If you're doing multiplatform with consoles/mobile that's even more in the mix, and you need to consider what will reward the time spent on it.

> their main concern is getting a working product out the door

Yes. You'd be horrified if you saw how many game-specific hacks each GPU driver had. Patching their horrors in drivers. So sad.

This also explains why drivers for new PC-GPUs (Intel, Qualcomm) are so "bad". They probably aren't that bad, they just don't contain hacks for decades of games like Nvidia and AMD.

Because they are. At least in Unreal and Unity.

Unity 2022.3 (current LTS): https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.3/Documentation/Manual/render-...

  Built-in Render Pipeline: no DLSS, no FSR, no XeSS
  URP: no DLSS, FSR 1.0, no XeSS
  HDRP: DLSS, FSR 1.0, no XeSS

Unity 2023.2 (latest released version, not LTS): https://docs.unity3d.com/2023.2/Documentation/Manual/render-...

  same as above

Unity 6 (upcoming release, preview): https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/render-...

  Built-in Render Pipeline: no DLSS, no FSR, no XeSS
  URP: no DLSS, FSR 1.0, no XeSS
  HDRP: DLSS, FSR 1.0, FSR 2.0, no XeSS

There are also other methods supported by that engine, but we're not at a point where we'd have all-encompassing support, at least not yet. Maybe in a few years.

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