The Take: Are AI Rendering Tools Becoming a Crutch?
Borderlands 4 poor performance adds further fuel to brewing consumer frustration.
The performance issues that have plagued Borderlands 4 at launch rely on Nvidia’s DLSS to maintain basic performance.
AI rendering has become normalised within a short span in AAA titles.
A potential shift towards dependency on AI tools for launch windows.
An broader degradation of quality for PC players - while console owners suffer too.
Greetings to The Take, our editorial issues of the AI and Games Newsletter where we dig into the bigger issues impacting artificial intelligence in the video games industry. Issues of The Take are exclusive to premium subscribers of AI and Games.
Hello and welcome to our inaugural issue of The Take!
This is a new series where I get to editorialise a little bit more on the big issues surrounding AI in and around the games industry. For this first issue, I had a bunch of topics from throughout the year I wanted to tackle, but I figured let’s get into something that is current and relevant as the big release window of the year opens up.
Despite strong critical reception, the release of Borderlands 4 has received a lot of criticism from consumers due to performance issues both on PC and console. Critically, the PC version’s optimisation has added sufficient fuel to a brewing frustration among players about the ever increasing use of Nvidia’s AI-rendering technology. Given it’s difficult to play the game with any level of consistency as a result unless you have a very powerful desktop computer.
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Another Bajillion Guns…
Gearbox released Borderlands 4 on September 12th to largely positive critical reception: with the sentiment being it’s a return to form and a much needed iteration on the core formula after the lacklustre and cringe-inducing Borderlands 3 in 2019. But outside of the reviews, the narrative surrounding the game at the moment is less about how fun it is to play, but how frustrating it is to try and get it to run with any level of smooth performance.
A Year of PC Mishaps: The looter shooter is the latest in a number of high-profile releases in the past year that have suffered from issues at launch on PC. With Alan Wake 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, Rise of the Ronin, Wolong Fallen Dynasty and even just last week analysis of Dying Light: The Beast suggests that the game does not perform well out of the gate.
Now it’s worth making the all important caveat that shipping games to PC is a significant challenge. Speaking from experience, shipping to PC means you’re dealing with a wide variety of motherboards, CPUs, GPUs and memory profiles that means issues may only impact a specific contingent of players who have a particular hardware make-up (or even the drivers for said hardware). While satisfying console certification on the likes of PlayStation, Switch, and Xbox is a challenge, the one benefit is that the hardware profiles are static - even if it means fighting around shipping on the low-powered Xbox Series S.
But the bigger issue that’s brewing is that in many instances, the suggestion from studios is to rely on real-time AI-powered upscaling technology as a means to smooth out the performance. If you’re not familiar, most AAA games now support the likes of AMD’s FixelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) or Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) as part of the graphics features. These are AI-supported development tools that allow for you to run a game at a higher resolution - and even frame rate - than your device can support, by relying on the AI processing cores now built into contemporary GPUs.
DLSS All Day, Every Day: The furore surrounding Borderlands 4 has been exacerbated by the game more or less requiring the use of Nvidia’s DLSS at launch in order to have even close to a stable performance even on lower spec devices. Nvidia provided a full-suite of recommendations for various hardware profiles, which has received significant ire from players when it was noted that regardless of setting, you should - in the eyes of Nvidia anyway - be running the game with DLSS enabled.
So what’s going on here? Well, there’s a bunch of issues happening at once:
A push for AI upscaling to transition from a feature, to a requirement.
An inflection point with consumers frustration with AI rendering.
A culmination of years of brewing discontent.
Poor communication from studios on how to address the issues.
Gearbox being a serial offender in this instance.
A growing disparity in quality of console vs PC launches.
Though even the console versions of Borderlands 4 have their problems.
A market cannibalising its audience, as PC gamers have to keep up with inconsistent hardware requirements. Meanwhile consoles no longer provide the accessible entry point they once did.
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