proteh

I feel incredibly lucky that my first project after finishing my PhD became #DLSS5. In my first 1:1 with @edliu1105, I created this slide to show what I believed next-generation rendering could become. For me, this was the beginning of the journey. My North Star for rendering has always been a world indistinguishable from footage captured by a real camera. The realism upper bound for existing #DLSS is path tracing (PT). PT can faithfully simulate the scene we describe—but that scene remains an approximation of the real world. As a result, it still looks fake, plastic, far from visually realistic in most of the current gaming. The rise of generative models opened a complementary path. Early results gave us enough signal to pursue a belief: learned real-world appearance priors could work with physically based rendering—not replace it—to move beyond this ceiling. DLSS 5 is our first step: a generative video model that operates in real time at up to 4K while remaining grounded in the authored scene. Getting here took years. Skepticism pushed us to clarify the idea, strengthen the system, and make the evidence more rigorous. I’m deeply grateful for the leadership of @edliu1105, @drewtao and @ctnzr, and for our team’s extraordinary execution. I’m proud that we have demonstrated a new research and design space in graphics rendering—one that deserves much more exploration. If you work in graphics, vision, or generative models, I hope you’ll read our technical report and join us in exploring it.