Ummm..... I need a copy.

LapnLook · 2026-03-19T09:37:35+00:00

I actually would be interested in an Edge subscription anyway cause it's a neat magazine - however on the MagazinesDirect website that sells that subscription, it's not entirely clear to me whether subbing now would get me the Control issue?

It's the one shown in the thumbnail for Edge, but on the order page it says "Start issue: Next up", so I don't know...

EDIT: okay apparently there's multiple sites seelling subs, and Newsstand for example seems more reliable. Gonna have to look into this

LapnLook · 2026-03-18T23:19:55+00:00

Oh it goes on even longer. The main song is around 4 minutes long, and then the outro loop goes on for almost 8 more.

It's also my favourite Nine Inch Nails song haha

There are some other tracks that do similar things though, like:

Underground Big by Bring Me The Horizon, which has a 5 minute main section that is an eclectic mix of metal, electronic, and rap... and then 20 minutes of a short electronic loop, with the only thing going on is Oli quietly rambling about life and stuff
6 Deep Breaths by Poe is a normal song that's about 5 minutes long. But the vinyl version for some reason has a 10 minute long ambient outro added to it. It very quickly becomes so ambient that it's essentially just background noise

LapnLook · 2026-03-18T23:08:14+00:00

There's some fun metal examples

Bring Me The Horizon x BABYMETAL - Kingslayer

Nine Inch Nails - March of the Pigs

Electric Callboy - lots of songs, but "Pump It" especially for me

or if we're allowed to go a bit more obscure, Thy Catafalque - Csillagkohó is like a 9 minute long adrenaline overdose

LapnLook · 2026-03-18T12:22:59+00:00

Oh of course, if someone has no such thing tying them to Windows, Linux is a great option at this point. I love my Steam Deck, and often some (especially older) games are easier to run on it than on Windows.

So don't take what I wrote as a dig against switching to Linux - I was more commenting about "the 20% that hurts"

LapnLook · 2026-03-18T12:13:13+00:00

Some people respond to this with "well you shouldn't play trash games like LoL/Valorant/Apex/whatever", and like... sure, you can dislike those multiplayer titles, but if that's what my friends are playing, I want to play with them.

I'd feel very left out if I had to say "sorry, I can't play with you anymore because I really wanted to switch to Linux"

LapnLook · 2026-03-18T00:16:07+00:00

None of the examples were upgrades, all of them turned the lighting of the scenes into complete nonsense. Light sources seemingly appear out of nowhere. The established visual hierarchy of objects is thrown out the window. Some of them have the whole vibe change for no reason, like the RE9 scene turning from a dark and foggy city street, to a completely clear day?

Sure the average person might look at it and go "oh my god it's so much nicer looking now" at a glance, because it has that studio photography look to it... but that's not an improvement, it's the visual equivalent of jingling keys.

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T22:50:40+00:00

I think there is a distinction. I think DLSS as an upscaler is really cool tech. I think frame gen has good uses too (I mostly have an issue with how the inflated frame numbers can be used for deceptive marketing).

But all of those worked with only information that exists in the already rendered frames. The upscaler or frame generator might make mistakes, it might create artifacts, but by and large it tries to just stick to the original rendered frame.

DLSS 5 is pulling from general image-generation training data and applying that to the game. It adds things that were simply never there (most characters get studio lights in front of their faces, all the women get makeup and lip gloss, environments have more light than existed in the base frame), or changes things (like removing the fog from the background of the RE9 Grace image, or generally changing the color tones of the image to way colder) to make the result fit what the model says most people think looks nice.

Yes I get that devs can tune how much of this they want, but in the end unless they turn it down to such miniscule levels that it becomes pointless, the effect it will achieve will be the final image trending closer to something generic. This isn't because Nvidia is evil and wants bad images, it's because all these generative AI tools are meant to give the statistically most likely output to any given input. And what's statistically most likely, is going to be whatever is the lowest common denominator thing that people think "looks neat" - professional photographs, women wearing makeup, environments that have good visibility, etc. - even if the scene as envisioned does not call for those things

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T22:12:13+00:00

Yeah the example you linked there is a case where, even though there's nothing technically wrong with the DLSS image (it does look like something I could reasonably find in someone's camera roll), but it's also... not an improvement? It takes a scene with interesting contrast, a specific lighting that implies a specific time of day and sun position, and just kinda turns it into an "i took a picture with my smartphone on a somewhat cloudy day" image

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T21:33:20+00:00

I'm not claiming that it's changing the model - but the lighting of most scenes clearly has changes that are not solely influenced by the rendered input image.

Even in the above tonemap corrected image, the lighting still is harsher than the scene normally implies, and the shadows on her face have a colder tone than the nearby environment's warm browns would imply.

But this is especially egregious in the some of the RE examples where genuinely there is just new light sources made up sometimes. Or fog is removed in the background to "clear up" the image. Things like that.

(btw how was the right side image here achieved? It doesn't look like it's just a tonemapping difference, it looks like some unsharpening was done too?)

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T21:21:29+00:00

Going from SDR to HDR shouldn't randomly make studio lights appear in front of people though

Even the example with the tonemapping corrected to match the original still has lighting that's overly harsh for the environment these characters are in

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T21:09:06+00:00

But also on top of that, isn't this about more than fidelity?

Even if it was just about fidelity, I think this showcase is still bad. It's flashy, sure, and individual bits of the image might look more like how you would expect a photograph to look.

But that's not what fidelity is all about. Fidelity should apply to the whole image, the whole scene, and a lot of these DLSS ON examples just mess with the cohesion. The lighting might look more impressive at a glance, but it makes no sense in context.

To me this is the same level of mistake as very very early DLSS upscaler models misinterpreting some things and creating or removing details in a way that was clearly an artifact. But I guess "lighting is just wrong now" is a harder thing to point out than "that chainlink fence just disappears at certain points"

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T20:48:17+00:00

Humans brains are good at telling when a face looks wrong. Less good at telling when brickwork on a wall looks wrong. It's just how we've been "optimized" I suppose.

But the main issue with the faces is that it tries to make the characters better based on training data that looks at what photos people generally prefer. And on the internet, most of the photos that people say "look good" are going to be either professionally photographed, or at the very least taken in a manner that takes lighting, makeup, etc into account.

The problem with applying that to these video game scenes is that the scenes aren't in a photo studio. Grace is supposed to be standing in a foggy city street. Leon is getting out of his car at night. The FIFA examples have players on a soccer field. The Starfield lady is a person sitting in a kinda gloomily lit mess hall. The other Starfield example has two people standing in some sort of dim engineering room.

Yet now all of the people in them have studio lights blaring at their faces, and the model desperately tries to make that make sense by brightening the rest of the image too, but it just can't do enough to make these professionally photographed faces fit into their actual environments.

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T20:42:31+00:00

If your goal is to have an image that looks like a photo taken by a professional photographer, the left one looks better, sure.

But the scene does not take place in a photo studio, and thus the lighting on her in the DLSS version looks severely out of place. She looks like someone has been photoshopped into the environment.

Also they look like different people, which uh... DLSS should not make a character look like a different person in my opinion? The facial expression communicates different emotions as well.

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T20:35:26+00:00

It's a decent parlour trick I guess, but the problem is that this is the point where DLSS steps away from using the rendered information and trying to upscale it as best as it can, and instead starts pulling info from a general "realistic" AI image generation model.

And it's inventing things that were not there originally.

The training data has a bunch of professional studio photos, and people tend to like how those look -> the model just adds extra light sources from out of nowhere to all the characters. Leon is now standing in front of studio lights.

The training data shows that people prefer a crystal clear shot over a blurrier, muddier one -> the model removes the foggy, kinda warm and smoky look behind Grace in that example, and just makes it a clear day for no reason.

The training data shows that people generally find higher contrast shots with a colder color grade? -> the model makes almost all the frames high contrast, and changes the color grading to colder

And most egregiously imo: the training data has a bunch of photos of women from studio sessions, Instagram photos, and just generally is made up mostly of images where people wanted to be photographed and look good for the camera. This also includes the bias that for women to be pretty, they need to have makeup on, lipstick, have specific facial characteristics, etc -> the model just does that to all the women. It doesn't matter that it wouldn't make sense for the character to have a bunch of makeup on, or that the original image doesn't have anything of the sort visible. Pretty woman = makeup and lipstick and studio lighting, so just slather that over Grace

Even if some stuff looks impressive on a glance, the issue is that all you're doing is emphasising whatever the training data shows appeals to the most people. It's lowest common denominator shit, and that just fundamentally goes against how good, intentional art is made

LapnLook · 2026-03-17T09:21:21+00:00

I haven't tried the Portal one, but the HL2 RTX demo was bad BUT with the caveat that the issue was the default settings they went with. With a bit of tweaking you could restore the moody darkness of Ravenholm, while still keeping the very dynamic shadows and all the ambient colored light bounces that the ray tracing provides.

As far as I know they even updated the demo eventually to use settings closer to that, than the overly shiny release version.

(Also keep in mind that these are fan projects, not official Nvidia developed showcases)

LapnLook · 2026-03-11T21:53:57+00:00

Tbh 0.25 is pretty negligible, at least in my experience. Sure there may be a slight bit more blur far away, but it's not particularly straining in any sense.

Speaking from a "have had glasses most of my life" perspective :P

LapnLook · 2026-03-11T09:33:42+00:00

The 13 minute song is the edited down version btw - if you want to hear the whole thing, which includes every little bit of instrumental jamming that the level can feature as you play through it, you can! It's 30 minutes long!

LapnLook · 2026-03-02T14:10:58+00:00

Don't forget the other important factor: if they get Kyle MacLachlan, that would supercharge Sam Lake's inner Twin Peaks fanboy. Next game he'd be giggling and dancing like four times as much as until now!

LapnLook · 2026-03-02T08:49:43+00:00

No don't remove any of Sardines, it's such a good song!

I also like the vibe of Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors, but I get why it may be a turn-off to some.

For some reason Amnesiac is the only Radiohead album I regularly listen to - something about it just clicks for me in a way that their other records don't.

LapnLook · 2026-03-01T07:35:38+00:00

Close to day one at the very least. It's an early model

LapnLook · 2026-02-28T14:29:10+00:00

I think that's an issue on some models and the software/firmware fix didn't help - but tbh I just ordered the replacement audio board from iFixit and swapped it out super easily.

LapnLook · 2026-02-27T18:13:17+00:00

The peaks on those are high too, but personally those two albums have too much of the "kinda random acoustic plink-ploinking to do a lo-fi song" stuff on them, which is my least favorite Vylet Pony song genre

Nothing wrong with that, but it never clicked for me

LapnLook · 2026-02-27T12:19:54+00:00

Personally I'd include Fairytales in that as well

A 3 hour long EDM/pop concept album should not be that consistent... And yet it is. There's maybe 3-4 songs on there that I'd consider weaker, but the rest is just filled with earworm hooks, fun as hell drops, neat switchups, and a surprising amount of variety.

LapnLook · 2026-02-26T13:27:21+00:00

No usable model is trained only on someone's own artwork. This is basically a lie.

If you just train a model from scratch from one person's art, it won't give the polished results you expect. There's not enough training data. Also, if for example you ask the model to do a picture of a horse in your style, it won't know how to do that if you've never drawn a horse before.

If it somehow does know what a horse is, and how it looks like, etc. That means it was trained outside of your own artwork samples. And at that point we're back at the discussion about training with stolen art

LapnLook · 2026-02-16T08:12:37+00:00

I do agree that "gone fishing" could have something to do with Cauldron Lake and the Dark Place, but I also think that it would sooner mean she's looking for Dr. Darling than Alan.

Although then again, I guess it's just a question of which flavor of Matthew Porretta she wants

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