With the right mods, the graphics in GTA 5 can be polished properly – but the open-world hit often doesn’t look really realistic. A research team has now entrusted an AI with this task and the result is simply incredible.
Languages:German English
release:04/14/2015
Platforms:Windows PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4
Top graphics for GTA 5: Rockstar classic looks really realistic
GTA 5 looked anything but bad on PS3 and Xbox 360, and the PC version that followed later upped the ante. This also opened the floodgates for modders to further improve the graphical quality of the open-world game with numerous mods and reshaders – GTA 5 didn’t look really photorealistic even then.
However, a new technology from the private Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, now seems to be making the dream come true. Stephan R. Richter, Hassan Abu AlHaija and Vladlen Koltun presented a “new approach to improving the realism of synthetic images”. The results of the work are impressive (Source: Arvix.org). The images created by the new technology are miles ahead of the competition, as a look at the following YouTube video impressively demonstrates:
Photorealism in games: AI and machine learning make it possible
To the realistic graphics To generate in GTA 5, the images must first go through a few steps. First, the in-game image is passed through an image enhancement network. At the same time, data sets are extracted from the game engine, which contain information about the surface properties of the objects, their distance from the camera or the lighting of the scene.
This data is then also fed into the image enhancement network. The resulting image is compared to a similar real-life photo and given a realism score. In this way, the system is trained and after a while it can achieve the impressive results from the video.
Not only GTA 5 can impress with a chic graphic – other games are in no way inferior to the rock star hit in this regard:
However, it is still too early to implement it in games. According to an excerpt from the official paper, the calculation of a single image with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 takes around half a second – the resulting real-time frame rate is therefore around 2 FPS. That’s still a bit too low for a game like GTA 5.
You can find out how AI can already improve the gaming experience in our Video:
Still, it’s amazing to see how far modern technology has come. And maybe in a few years this technology or something similar can actually be used in games. We will see.