Makes a lot of sense that old game environments look uncanny when only the textures are changed (and the material properties of everything are kinda wrong).
I think it really shows how important artistic coherence is for something like this, something AI just isn't capable of (at the moment). Even if the individual textures look better than the originals, they each deviate in subtly different ways which helps add to the uncanniness of the final product. Still a fascinating video though!
If this is the new style of content you were referring too when it came to your analysis video im all for it. This video title is a clear winner, along with the thumbnail choice. I'm very much looking forward to 2025 already!
I had a recent discussion with you in a comment thread regarding my skepticism towards the direction graphics development trends are going. I cut it short because I was about to disagree and I thought it might cause unneeded animosity. I realized I had a consumer-centric view on the whole thing, and didn't consider the perspective of a hobbyist using these new tools trying to have fun with a project like this. I can now understand your enthusiasm about the new technological advancements in rendering and I fully support projects like these, even if they might not necessarily be optimized to high industry standards. Please keep doing what you're doing.
Something I want to add to the discussion is that in writing, there’s a phenomenon called ‘trunk novels’. Stories written that never get published (thus left in the car’s trunk), because they are utter garbage, as is 80% of everyone’s literary work. The stuff that gets published is the 20% that’s good. There’s absolutely a good case for just having fun with these tools as a hobbyist. I think it’s important though that it does not turn into outright spam (EG on mod websites), given the ease of creating it.
So far, I've only seen RTX Remix really shine when the AI upscaling tech is ignored and modders build replacements by hand. A lot of the AI replacements look sort of melted. The issue you mentioned with its secondary texture maps is really evident (particularly with roughness) and makes the lighting on a lot of surfaces look flat, with a strangely milky and washed out tint. Regarding mirrors in Deus Ex, they actually DID have proper mirrors in the game and they weren't faked: they were a surface effect you could apply to any brush face that just worked straight out of the box without requiring you to manually duplicate geometry. You could even turn them off to save on performance. There are a number of floors in UNATCO HQ that also have reflections turned on. Regarding the props that the editor thinks are level geometry: they probably ARE level geometry. Stuff like plants and chairs generally tended to be their own imported models in UE1 games but stuff like doors and lights are mostly brush work. Also, curiously, Remix doesn't seem to notice when a texture is animated and you only get one frame. Note how the newsreader on the TV is supposed to speak but isn't.
As someone who's done extensive state-of-the-art image generation with AI, the RTX Remix's AI upscaling seems very last generation. I wonder if doing the textures "by hand" using better AI would be a good idea. Most of the opensource models are now in very efficient forms and can be used by main stream gaming GPUs with even small VRAMs.
the dark areas look pretty decent but the brighter areas defineitely have the minecraft hd cow thing going on. also that leather office chair makes me uncomfortable 😭
The first time I entered UNATCO HQ was magical for 10 year old me and even now almost 20 years later, it still is. I still remember every nook and cranny and remember every password, keycode and hidden stash.
As much as the AI stuff looks garbage, I'm still extremely excited for how Remix can make some older titles like this truly impressive again when in the hands of talented teams
you should check out sonic adventure dx with nvidia remix. someone posted a full sonic story playthru, it looks kind of wrong in some places but most of the time its an insane lighting and material upgrade
Phillip you have a chokehold on the idea of nostalgia, when I watch one of your videos, it doesn’t matter if it’s posted 5 minutes ago, I feel like I’m watching something obscure I found at 3AM on the weird side of UA-cam. What I’m trying to say is your vids are super high quality. Every video gives that sense of achievement you get when you find something cool/rare that other people need to see. It might just be the music.
I remain confident and optimistic that such tools will be, dare I say, revolutionary for modders. Being able to remaster old games In a relatively short amount of time (and minimal effort) can, no doubt, breathe new life into classics that mitigate the classic "perhaps I was blinded by nostalgia" reaction when typically playing games from childhood. However, I still fear how such technology will inevitably lead to an onslaught of cheap, mass produced games that sell on cinematic trailers but are in reality quickly produced garbage for a quick buck before the reviews flood in. As always, the advances in technology no doubt create winners and losers.
I've been using AI to generate placeholder textures while developing games, and It's been pretty useful to get a good feeling, for levels or UI. Cool to see ai upscaling being used like this.
3:15 I feel like that texture is actually a pretty good low res representation of those cheap corporate carpet tiles. I can't find any with THAT much color in them, but a lot of different patterns are out there. But yeah, I'm not sure ai-upscaling quite got it right. if you look at 3:25 the part right up against the edge and closer to the comer is pretty dang close but the parts that look like squares are wrong.
Something I wonder is whether doing it with modern gen-AI might not be a case of ‘fishing for trout with a nuclear aircraft carrier’. If upping the resolution is primarily what you’re after, this is something you could already accomplish with much less sophisticated tools.
I feel like a 3D game this old is probably the worst case scenario for AI with how abstract the details are, especially in a vacuum. I'd love to see you take on a slightly more modern game, where the visuals are still noticeably dated but still detailed enough that the AI is doing less heavy lifting and hopefully would make the distinct AI blobbiness less noticeable
I feel like texture resolution isn't the thing actually missing. It needs to fit with the geometric detail. I think simply adding nicer global illumination and ambient occlusion for more atmosphere, and maybe adding some material qualities to the existing textures, would be the only way to do this without actually remaking things.
I think increasing the texture quality without increasing the geometry quality ends up creating dissonance between the two. And not to mention, there is a lot of charm in low-resolution style (nostalgia aside) that gets lost. It makes sense why people dont necessarily like the end result, since half of their brain is still seeing the old environment. I enjoyed watching the process though. I dont think it will become a magic solution for remastering old games, as nothing will beat the discerning quality of the human eye. But the fact that the technology for this is getting better this quickly is a spectacle of it's own.
I've played DeusEx for the first time last year and got absolutely impressed with how superior it is compared to any modern game, every detail and possibility is incredible. Became an instant favorite, i think about the soundtrack every day too, one of the best, my favorite alongside TES:Oblivion.
As a blender user, i can definitely see the main flaw is the lack of a roughness map. Sure displacement is good. But if you can't change how shiny something is then whats the point of anything. Again, that mirror like you mentioned is a prime example of why it looks "too flat and too bumpy at the same time" Everything's averaged out to a bland grey of reflecting and absorbing exactly 50% of all light hitting everything. Also this is called sheen in blender, and changing its value changes how washed out evertything looks at a certain angle, and to me, everything's sheen looks way too high.
One improvement I can think of is that Remix could automatically place the RTX light in a room based on its luminosity value, so you don't have to manually set them one by one or at least cut the workforce by half.
I work in AI research (image recognition) and I personally hate generative AI when it's used to replace passion or used to replace people/artists. If you're doing a work that is explicitly *about* AI then I think it's totally valid that you use generative AI to work on it. I hate being lied to, but you're not lying. You are forthright with your use of AI for your purposes and I appreciate that. Nobody (else) is having to eat beans on toast because you wanted to save 5gbp on hiring an artist on Fiverr or whatever to draw illustrations for you. Personally I enjoy hand-made things more than AI, even if they're dogcrap, MS Paint that looks like garbage; simply because "you tried" ⭐ /tangent Great video as always
What Nvidia have done is created a foundation for a ton of graphics mods, since they are all gonna be community made, they are all a labour of love. As for the AI upscaled textures, I let custom maps and mods get away with copyright infringement all the time, I dont see why it's different here.
Yeah, I have been waiting for you to make more RTX Remix content! Interested in the technology behind it, but I don't have enough motivation to wrestle with it myself. So this is perfect, thank you.
I think one major obstacle to using AI upscaling is that it doesn't really capture the *feel* of some textures in the original product. Sometimes blurry pixelated textured are the way they are because it speaks to a lot of the compromises that were made. One texture could be of a lower quality because it isn't as pronounced or critical to gameplay or just wants to be perceived as fuzzy or soft, whereas another wall texture is of a much higher quality because it needs to be convincingly tiled. What happens when you put AI to the test and blanket upscale everything is that this gradient shrinks at higher resolutions compared to lower ones, and you just end up with a game where every texture is instantly readable in "high fidelity" to some extent, and that makes the experience a bit alien. Like there wasn't a line drawn in the presentation of the game that says "enough is enough". it could just be bias talking, but for me, the original Deus Ex is a perfect example of conveying that "enough is enough" palette on some of its textures.
The Neural Rendering tech that NVidia showed off at CES (replacing traditional shaders with some kind of magic AI sauce) would probably fit quite neatly into the pipeline.
I love these AI videos Philip. You are showing the wonderful side of user curated AI with them. Not all people will agree, and that's okay, but I really like this usecase.
i really think the best content you make are these pseudo philosophical explorations of the future technologies and possibilities. everybody is kinda scared of the implications of AI so its refreshing to see such a nuanced reflection on it without the bias against it
I think the "too flat but too bumpy" comes from using a lot of displacement, but not using normal maps. Maybe if the AI is no good at creating those, try different tools such as Materialize to create them. I think it would really improve the overall look of these materials
I think a lot of the issues on your generated textures come down to upscaling used, since it tends to make those blobby/oilpaint like artifacts. It could also be that I prefer lower resolution AI images, if they are still sharp enough/don't have those artifacts. I've used some AI generated textures on HL Alyx maps before, and funnily enough generating larger images without upscaling can be faster than trying to upscale small images, at least on my computer and the upscaler that came with webui.
The problem with AI generated textures is losing the art style of deus ex. When you're in game, you expect wood to look like every other piece of wood, unless it's specifcally a different type of wood. AI doesn't make this distinction. It could generate completely different looking textures using materials that were meant to be the same thing, because in this implementation it's looking at objects individually. This also creates textures that look incorrect because the AI cannot fully understand what the object a texture is being mapped onto. Take the chair in manderley's office for example. It looks like flesh more than a leathery office chair, because the AI only sees a low resolution image and understands the object using that texture instead of creating an actual scene using a combination of geometry and textures, like how deus ex was originally made. It'll be both interesting (and a little scary) to see if there will be further implementations of AI could actually create assets for games in the same way humans do, although it's difficult to understand how far AI can go from where it's at right now.
If someone could mod in ragdoll physics (like when tossing bodies) and extra details through level geometry in-game (that way, collision would work on said things), proper emissive materials (that way stuff like the map display, TV, or overhead lights don't need light entities to emit light), and overhauled meshes and such, you probably could get a modern looking Deus Ex remake out of RTX Remix. Would be cool if a full blown team could work on that. That said, the AI upscaling and revamping of textures just doesn't look right at all to me.
Love the vids philip, and you know what they say. Haters gonna hate. In regards to why it looks so off putting, The dissonance between the texture quality and model quality is what throws it off a lot for me, another comment said it best when they referenced hd Minecraft texture packs. Just doesn't look cohesive, even if the models were all hd I still think it'd be strange you would have to go back and change the animations to match, oh and add some clutter to the environments so they don't look so empty and well before you know it your just about remaking the whole game... It's quite a lot and weird how the same thing doesn't apply when you just use the path tracing, for some reason lighting is like in its own world/bubble and we can accept discontinuity. Any ways thank you for the vid and thoughts ❤️
This is a very interesting result considering the base game textures were 32x32. Perhaps the HDTP textures that were retextured by humans upto unreal 1 engine's 256x256 texture limit would be a better starting point for the AI upscale algorithm.
That intestine chair is horrifying. I think RTX Remix needs a V2.0 to get closer to the promised functionality. Personally, as someone that never played this game and has zero nostalgia, even if the AI did everything correctly it would still look pretty bad with that geometry. It would need to edit the maps as well.
This is a very good video. It made me wonder. You planning on buying RTX 5090? And would you recommend it for someone with 4090 who only wants to play games in native (no dlss)?
The more I interact with AI generated content the more it becomes obvious that for best results it needs strong direction from a human. If you leave AI to its own devices it will go way too far and generate a lot of nonsense. Regarding lighting: The issue with adding realistic lighting to environments from old games is that in those games it wasn't uncommon for lighting to make no sense when compared to the number and position of physical light fixtures especially in a game like Deus Ex where adding those extra light fixtures might have used up too much of the polygon budget. Light is also often used to guide the player and thus leaving only the realistic light sources might make the game worse to play if you don't remember exactly where to go.
I'm worried that Remix won't see wide adoption due to the fact the entire game is basically being rendered twice... I really hope to see some way of better "bridging" remix and the game so that remix can gain a better contextual understanding of the world, and so that the game engine isnt rendering models with textures and lights only to throw them out again and replace them. I also really think that Remix relies *too much* on path tracing, when in certain elements it would be more beneficial to be able to choose to use traditional, rasterized workarounds (for example for smaller or further away objects, or reflective surfaces where SSR/cubemaps might look just as good as RT)
That milky sheen that everything gets from apply PBR materials but the omitting any specular/roughness/whatever maps really kills the looks. Maybes everything look like it a cardboard cutout.
I don't agree with you calling this creative work. Even if it were perfect and indistinguishable, and if in the process you gave it almost infinite amounts of your creative prompts and human input, in the end it's derivative, probably thieving in terms of training data and ultimately contributes nothing of value as no emotion and no hardship is present in the process. Is it worth it to speed up, streamline, dehumanize even the few last outlets we have in modern society, just gnawing away in the quest to remove all the thinking? Any of your philosophizing in the current situation, AI not being "there yet", where the human factor is still in the progress of dying on its hill, doesn't at all take away from the fact that the direction and its logical conclusion, which you seem to be pushing for and embracing, is inherently isolating, dehumanizing and depressing, just by virtue of what it does to our psyche. In the end, the man with the GPU farm is going to sell you your very own customized moving picture for the rest of your life. You might get to put your prompt on top, but who guarantees you that they don't put their own after it, or poison the training data? This doesn't just include art, it also includes factual information, social structures and emotion. We can already see all the questionable products which the "innovators" are straining at their leash trying to sell to you, even before the sunrise of AI, with despicable business models such as Tiktok. Human output is already being diluted, streamlined and averaged out by the forced statistical convergence towards the median that is current AI output, in what we can all recognize and lament as the dying of truthful and useful information on the internet. Do we really want to do the same with art? We as people have forgotten why entertainment, stories, art is even meaningful in the first place. Just pushing dopamine "faster", with less effort, "individualized" is not going to cut it at all, just as being more productive and ever increasing consumption and growth hasn't yielded more equitable quality of life for the individual. If everyone can "create" infinite amounts of output, why should *any* person aim to consume *any* of it?
Perhaps the reason why the result is questionable in quality is due to one sided approach. The only thing author used is ai tools, but why use them when there's just higher resolution non ai textures available, or you might even use ai tools to blend new textures better with the old ones or something like that. But there was more than enough examples of mods using higher resolution textures replacements and it seems as if people were never into it all that much. I think it's more important to understand what you even want to achieve from such tinkering and have at least some artistic comprehension of whether or not it would look nicer or just horrendous. With deus ex it's like trying to remaster a square box. Simple texture swap and real time lighting sources won't do much in a game made out of flat surfaces.
All the models look like you just imported them into blender without disabling that stupid oily or shiny effect that comes with the default material settings
It's almost impressive how the end result ended up worse then original
Makes a lot of sense that old game environments look uncanny when only the textures are changed (and the material properties of everything are kinda wrong).
I think it really shows how important artistic coherence is for something like this, something AI just isn't capable of (at the moment). Even if the individual textures look better than the originals, they each deviate in subtly different ways which helps add to the uncanniness of the final product. Still a fascinating video though!
The vending machine 'filled with crisps' was wonderful
It was a great improvement
with the power of AI we can make any game look like a UA-cam video from 2013 showing "ultra realism modded skyrim"
If this is the new style of content you were referring too when it came to your analysis video im all for it. This video title is a clear winner, along with the thumbnail choice. I'm very much looking forward to 2025 already!
Shoutout to the chair in Manderley's office that looks less Deus Ex and more Cruelty Squad.
I had a recent discussion with you in a comment thread regarding my skepticism towards the direction graphics development trends are going. I cut it short because I was about to disagree and I thought it might cause unneeded animosity.
I realized I had a consumer-centric view on the whole thing, and didn't consider the perspective of a hobbyist using these new tools trying to have fun with a project like this. I can now understand your enthusiasm about the new technological advancements in rendering and I fully support projects like these, even if they might not necessarily be optimized to high industry standards. Please keep doing what you're doing.
Something I want to add to the discussion is that in writing, there’s a phenomenon called ‘trunk novels’. Stories written that never get published (thus left in the car’s trunk), because they are utter garbage, as is 80% of everyone’s literary work. The stuff that gets published is the 20% that’s good.
There’s absolutely a good case for just having fun with these tools as a hobbyist. I think it’s important though that it does not turn into outright spam (EG on mod websites), given the ease of creating it.
So far, I've only seen RTX Remix really shine when the AI upscaling tech is ignored and modders build replacements by hand. A lot of the AI replacements look sort of melted.
The issue you mentioned with its secondary texture maps is really evident (particularly with roughness) and makes the lighting on a lot of surfaces look flat, with a strangely milky and washed out tint.
Regarding mirrors in Deus Ex, they actually DID have proper mirrors in the game and they weren't faked: they were a surface effect you could apply to any brush face that just worked straight out of the box without requiring you to manually duplicate geometry. You could even turn them off to save on performance. There are a number of floors in UNATCO HQ that also have reflections turned on.
Regarding the props that the editor thinks are level geometry: they probably ARE level geometry. Stuff like plants and chairs generally tended to be their own imported models in UE1 games but stuff like doors and lights are mostly brush work.
Also, curiously, Remix doesn't seem to notice when a texture is animated and you only get one frame. Note how the newsreader on the TV is supposed to speak but isn't.
As someone who's done extensive state-of-the-art image generation with AI, the RTX Remix's AI upscaling seems very last generation. I wonder if doing the textures "by hand" using better AI would be a good idea. Most of the opensource models are now in very efficient forms and can be used by main stream gaming GPUs with even small VRAMs.
@@zxbc1can you point me in the direction of some good tools? I'd like to learn more.
the dark areas look pretty decent but the brighter areas defineitely have the minecraft hd cow thing going on. also that leather office chair makes me uncomfortable 😭
looks like it's made of feces
The first time I entered UNATCO HQ was magical for 10 year old me and even now almost 20 years later, it still is. I still remember every nook and cranny and remember every password, keycode and hidden stash.
As much as the AI stuff looks garbage, I'm still extremely excited for how Remix can make some older titles like this truly impressive again when in the hands of talented teams
you should check out sonic adventure dx with nvidia remix. someone posted a full sonic story playthru, it looks kind of wrong in some places but most of the time its an insane lighting and material upgrade
Phillip you have a chokehold on the idea of nostalgia, when I watch one of your videos, it doesn’t matter if it’s posted 5 minutes ago, I feel like I’m watching something obscure I found at 3AM on the weird side of UA-cam.
What I’m trying to say is your vids are super high quality. Every video gives that sense of achievement you get when you find something cool/rare that other people need to see. It might just be the music.
To me this is the perfect use for AI. One guy having fun modding a game
I remain confident and optimistic that such tools will be, dare I say, revolutionary for modders. Being able to remaster old games In a relatively short amount of time (and minimal effort) can, no doubt, breathe new life into classics that mitigate the classic "perhaps I was blinded by nostalgia" reaction when typically playing games from childhood. However, I still fear how such technology will inevitably lead to an onslaught of cheap, mass produced games that sell on cinematic trailers but are in reality quickly produced garbage for a quick buck before the reviews flood in. As always, the advances in technology no doubt create winners and losers.
The news anchor lady, the paintings, and the pinball machine probably came out the nicest here.
5:54 those stone faces will haunt my dreams forever 😂
omg the vent filled with crisps is hilarious
That pinball machine is a BLACK KNIGHT 2000. In case you wanted to find the real life textures and exchange them.
This is some of the worst content you've ever produced. I love it.
I've been using AI to generate placeholder textures while developing games, and It's been pretty useful to get a good feeling, for levels or UI. Cool to see ai upscaling being used like this.
3:15 I feel like that texture is actually a pretty good low res representation of those cheap corporate carpet tiles. I can't find any with THAT much color in them, but a lot of different patterns are out there.
But yeah, I'm not sure ai-upscaling quite got it right. if you look at 3:25 the part right up against the edge and closer to the comer is pretty dang close but the parts that look like squares are wrong.
The Crisp machine is honestly awesome and hilarious.
Consider my vision augmented. Great nostalgia and great to hear you had fun!
Something I wonder is whether doing it with modern gen-AI might not be a case of ‘fishing for trout with a nuclear aircraft carrier’. If upping the resolution is primarily what you’re after, this is something you could already accomplish with much less sophisticated tools.
I feel like a 3D game this old is probably the worst case scenario for AI with how abstract the details are, especially in a vacuum. I'd love to see you take on a slightly more modern game, where the visuals are still noticeably dated but still detailed enough that the AI is doing less heavy lifting and hopefully would make the distinct AI blobbiness less noticeable
I remember first stepping foot on MGERTY ISLAND... such a magical experience...
I feel like texture resolution isn't the thing actually missing. It needs to fit with the geometric detail. I think simply adding nicer global illumination and ambient occlusion for more atmosphere, and maybe adding some material qualities to the existing textures, would be the only way to do this without actually remaking things.
Google image search found the original artwork instantly. I tried with this one 4:08 - it's "Wall Street Eighteen Nineties" by Renne Hughes
13:19 you can do that with ControlNet
I think increasing the texture quality without increasing the geometry quality ends up creating dissonance between the two. And not to mention, there is a lot of charm in low-resolution style (nostalgia aside) that gets lost. It makes sense why people dont necessarily like the end result, since half of their brain is still seeing the old environment.
I enjoyed watching the process though. I dont think it will become a magic solution for remastering old games, as nothing will beat the discerning quality of the human eye. But the fact that the technology for this is getting better this quickly is a spectacle of it's own.
Oh look, someone made cruelty squad 2! 😍
I've played DeusEx for the first time last year and got absolutely impressed with how superior it is compared to any modern game, every detail and possibility is incredible.
Became an instant favorite, i think about the soundtrack every day too, one of the best, my favorite alongside TES:Oblivion.
Your tastes have gotten augmented... Yeees.
You should play Fallout New Vegas if you haven't already, sounds extremely up your alley. Disco elysium you might very much enjoy too
Try Arx Fatalis.
It will probably ruin TES games for you.
As a blender user, i can definitely see the main flaw is the lack of a roughness map. Sure displacement is good. But if you can't change how shiny something is then whats the point of anything. Again, that mirror like you mentioned is a prime example of why it looks "too flat and too bumpy at the same time" Everything's averaged out to a bland grey of reflecting and absorbing exactly 50% of all light hitting everything. Also this is called sheen in blender, and changing its value changes how washed out evertything looks at a certain angle, and to me, everything's sheen looks way too high.
This project looks really fun and makes me wana get back into modding
There's something so anachronistic to seeing such high quality assets in a game made up of 3 polygons.
One improvement I can think of is that Remix could automatically place the RTX light in a room based on its luminosity value, so you don't have to manually set them one by one or at least cut the workforce by half.
I work in AI research (image recognition) and I personally hate generative AI when it's used to replace passion or used to replace people/artists. If you're doing a work that is explicitly *about* AI then I think it's totally valid that you use generative AI to work on it. I hate being lied to, but you're not lying. You are forthright with your use of AI for your purposes and I appreciate that.
Nobody (else) is having to eat beans on toast because you wanted to save 5gbp on hiring an artist on Fiverr or whatever to draw illustrations for you.
Personally I enjoy hand-made things more than AI, even if they're dogcrap, MS Paint that looks like garbage; simply because "you tried" ⭐
/tangent
Great video as always
What Nvidia have done is created a foundation for a ton of graphics mods, since they are all gonna be community made, they are all a labour of love. As for the AI upscaled textures, I let custom maps and mods get away with copyright infringement all the time, I dont see why it's different here.
Damn you Philip! I have important stuff I want to do! I can't afford to replay Deus Ex now!
But now I have to!
Great video Philip! Thank you, and I hope you are doing well!
9:13 in the begining the hl2 remix was a one man project 😅
paralax mapped textures always fry my brain every time I see them, I know how they work and yet I 100% don't know how they work
Yeah, I have been waiting for you to make more RTX Remix content! Interested in the technology behind it, but I don't have enough motivation to wrestle with it myself. So this is perfect, thank you.
Did you tweet about the crisps in the vent ages ago? I seem to remember that.
I think one major obstacle to using AI upscaling is that it doesn't really capture the *feel* of some textures in the original product. Sometimes blurry pixelated textured are the way they are because it speaks to a lot of the compromises that were made.
One texture could be of a lower quality because it isn't as pronounced or critical to gameplay or just wants to be perceived as fuzzy or soft, whereas another wall texture is of a much higher quality because it needs to be convincingly tiled.
What happens when you put AI to the test and blanket upscale everything is that this gradient shrinks at higher resolutions compared to lower ones, and you just end up with a game where every texture is instantly readable in "high fidelity" to some extent, and that makes the experience a bit alien. Like there wasn't a line drawn in the presentation of the game that says "enough is enough".
it could just be bias talking, but for me, the original Deus Ex is a perfect example of conveying that "enough is enough" palette on some of its textures.
The Neural Rendering tech that NVidia showed off at CES (replacing traditional shaders with some kind of magic AI sauce) would probably fit quite neatly into the pipeline.
I love these AI videos Philip. You are showing the wonderful side of user curated AI with them. Not all people will agree, and that's okay, but I really like this usecase.
i really think the best content you make are these pseudo philosophical explorations of the future technologies and possibilities. everybody is kinda scared of the implications of AI so its refreshing to see such a nuanced reflection on it without the bias against it
I love this new energy that you have in this video
The cat displacements are hilarious!
I really hope this style of title and thumbnail allow you be more successful while continuing making what you want
So this is the video that was running in the background in the klik empire analysis!
Love the exploration of new tech and its use by commoners like us.
not a fan of genAI in general, but there are worse uses for it tbh. fun experiment, thats why i like this channel
I take modern texture tech for granted 😆 the upscaling is great but everything is so flat and uniformly shiny!
This really reminds me of those 2048x2048 ULTRA HD HI RES REALISM texture packs for minecraft
I think the "too flat but too bumpy" comes from using a lot of displacement, but not using normal maps. Maybe if the AI is no good at creating those, try different tools such as Materialize to create them. I think it would really improve the overall look of these materials
"overly bumpy and overly flat". I think the word you're looking for is "rough"
I think a lot of the issues on your generated textures come down to upscaling used, since it tends to make those blobby/oilpaint like artifacts. It could also be that I prefer lower resolution AI images, if they are still sharp enough/don't have those artifacts. I've used some AI generated textures on HL Alyx maps before, and funnily enough generating larger images without upscaling can be faster than trying to upscale small images, at least on my computer and the upscaler that came with webui.
The art style is completely lost in the end result.
What is the art style? Can you describe it?
@@Ver11111haven’t watched the video yet but I guess it means a feeling . You don’t need to describe it in words necessarily
@@Randarrradara You do, though
8:50
@@Ver11111 8:41 Philip explained it himself
The problem with AI generated textures is losing the art style of deus ex.
When you're in game, you expect wood to look like every other piece of wood, unless it's specifcally a different type of wood. AI doesn't make this distinction. It could generate completely different looking textures using materials that were meant to be the same thing, because in this implementation it's looking at objects individually.
This also creates textures that look incorrect because the AI cannot fully understand what the object a texture is being mapped onto. Take the chair in manderley's office for example. It looks like flesh more than a leathery office chair, because the AI only sees a low resolution image and understands the object using that texture instead of creating an actual scene using a combination of geometry and textures, like how deus ex was originally made.
It'll be both interesting (and a little scary) to see if there will be further implementations of AI could actually create assets for games in the same way humans do, although it's difficult to understand how far AI can go from where it's at right now.
I zerk off to furry zorn
If someone could mod in ragdoll physics (like when tossing bodies) and extra details through level geometry in-game (that way, collision would work on said things), proper emissive materials (that way stuff like the map display, TV, or overhead lights don't need light entities to emit light), and overhauled meshes and such, you probably could get a modern looking Deus Ex remake out of RTX Remix. Would be cool if a full blown team could work on that.
That said, the AI upscaling and revamping of textures just doesn't look right at all to me.
Love the vids philip, and you know what they say. Haters gonna hate. In regards to why it looks so off putting, The dissonance between the texture quality and model quality is what throws it off a lot for me, another comment said it best when they referenced hd Minecraft texture packs. Just doesn't look cohesive, even if the models were all hd I still think it'd be strange you would have to go back and change the animations to match, oh and add some clutter to the environments so they don't look so empty and well before you know it your just about remaking the whole game... It's quite a lot and weird how the same thing doesn't apply when you just use the path tracing, for some reason lighting is like in its own world/bubble and we can accept discontinuity. Any ways thank you for the vid and thoughts ❤️
This is a very interesting result considering the base game textures were 32x32. Perhaps the HDTP textures that were retextured by humans upto unreal 1 engine's 256x256 texture limit would be a better starting point for the AI upscale algorithm.
the thing is that AI only looks good when you can't notice that it's AI, so it's kind of hard to make people's perception of it change
Great opening line
That intestine chair is horrifying.
I think RTX Remix needs a V2.0 to get closer to the promised functionality. Personally, as someone that never played this game and has zero nostalgia, even if the AI did everything correctly it would still look pretty bad with that geometry. It would need to edit the maps as well.
Love this type of stuff
This is a very good video. It made me wonder. You planning on buying RTX 5090? And would you recommend it for someone with 4090 who only wants to play games in native (no dlss)?
I always find something a bit visually disturbing about displacement mapping, like it makes me feel uncomfortable for some reason.
5:24 I've seen this part before. Am I a time traveler?
I wonder if it'll look better if you were to AI upscale textures and then run them through a modern pixelization filter at different levels of pixel.
The more I interact with AI generated content the more it becomes obvious that for best results it needs strong direction from a human. If you leave AI to its own devices it will go way too far and generate a lot of nonsense. Regarding lighting: The issue with adding realistic lighting to environments from old games is that in those games it wasn't uncommon for lighting to make no sense when compared to the number and position of physical light fixtures especially in a game like Deus Ex where adding those extra light fixtures might have used up too much of the polygon budget. Light is also often used to guide the player and thus leaving only the realistic light sources might make the game worse to play if you don't remember exactly where to go.
I'm worried that Remix won't see wide adoption due to the fact the entire game is basically being rendered twice... I really hope to see some way of better "bridging" remix and the game so that remix can gain a better contextual understanding of the world, and so that the game engine isnt rendering models with textures and lights only to throw them out again and replace them.
I also really think that Remix relies *too much* on path tracing, when in certain elements it would be more beneficial to be able to choose to use traditional, rasterized workarounds (for example for smaller or further away objects, or reflective surfaces where SSR/cubemaps might look just as good as RT)
But then how will Nvidia be able to profit from this? They NEED to make you use path tracing so that you're incentivised to buy their new GPUs.
fill it with crisps was brilliant ahahha
lol the vending machine vent
That milky sheen that everything gets from apply PBR materials but the omitting any specular/roughness/whatever maps really kills the looks. Maybes everything look like it a cardboard cutout.
14:21 already proven true within the first hour of the video being uploaded
clicked on my boys philip for hours to this
I don't agree with you calling this creative work. Even if it were perfect and indistinguishable, and if in the process you gave it almost infinite amounts of your creative prompts and human input, in the end it's derivative, probably thieving in terms of training data and ultimately contributes nothing of value as no emotion and no hardship is present in the process.
Is it worth it to speed up, streamline, dehumanize even the few last outlets we have in modern society, just gnawing away in the quest to remove all the thinking? Any of your philosophizing in the current situation, AI not being "there yet", where the human factor is still in the progress of dying on its hill, doesn't at all take away from the fact that the direction and its logical conclusion, which you seem to be pushing for and embracing, is inherently isolating, dehumanizing and depressing, just by virtue of what it does to our psyche.
In the end, the man with the GPU farm is going to sell you your very own customized moving picture for the rest of your life. You might get to put your prompt on top, but who guarantees you that they don't put their own after it, or poison the training data?
This doesn't just include art, it also includes factual information, social structures and emotion. We can already see all the questionable products which the "innovators" are straining at their leash trying to sell to you, even before the sunrise of AI, with despicable business models such as Tiktok. Human output is already being diluted, streamlined and averaged out by the forced statistical convergence towards the median that is current AI output, in what we can all recognize and lament as the dying of truthful and useful information on the internet. Do we really want to do the same with art?
We as people have forgotten why entertainment, stories, art is even meaningful in the first place. Just pushing dopamine "faster", with less effort, "individualized" is not going to cut it at all, just as being more productive and ever increasing consumption and growth hasn't yielded more equitable quality of life for the individual. If everyone can "create" infinite amounts of output, why should *any* person aim to consume *any* of it?
If someone wants to discuss any positives he sees to this, feel free though ^^
Perhaps the reason why the result is questionable in quality is due to one sided approach. The only thing author used is ai tools, but why use them when there's just higher resolution non ai textures available, or you might even use ai tools to blend new textures better with the old ones or something like that. But there was more than enough examples of mods using higher resolution textures replacements and it seems as if people were never into it all that much. I think it's more important to understand what you even want to achieve from such tinkering and have at least some artistic comprehension of whether or not it would look nicer or just horrendous. With deus ex it's like trying to remaster a square box. Simple texture swap and real time lighting sources won't do much in a game made out of flat surfaces.
...I......I.......I thought you were a GEP gun.
This was really cool
I can’t say it looks good, but it might be okay for the odd texture here and there that can’t be sourced.
Have you seen the dead rising remake? They did something similar
All the models look like you just imported them into blender without disabling that stupid oily or shiny effect that comes with the default material settings
I want to play half life, never played in my life, would you recommend using the RTX version or original?
dumb question
what an amazing video. so funny and engaing
who else pressed alt+r when this video started?
ai upscale of the textures remind me of the 4k hd textured minecraft cow 😂
5:09 President Johnny Cash.
Ventrilo jumpscare 15:11
No views first second bro fell off
Nice
damn dude thats sick
Honestly AI on textures is fine. Just dont use it to generate text... Yet.
send me a link to it so i can play it
Maybe it would work even better with newer games that have better textures and more geometri.
Something 10-15 years old not 25-30 year old 🤷♂
oh these were the clips you used in the empire analysis
looks like a NiPPER map
PUatɺC ACCESS