'Put them on the slides': How Jensen Huang invented and then announced Nvidia's DLSS AI upscaling tech in just two weeks
Before and after upscaling. Arguably, that's the most critical dividing line in gaming graphics hardware of the past 20 years. And it was, of course, Nvidia's DLSS upscaling that created that inflection point on release in 2019. But now it turns out DLSS went from an idea to a new feature announced to the public in just two weeks. And it was all Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's idea, apparently.
If that's an eye popping revelation, the fact that Nvidia also saw DLSS as a tool to charge more money for graphics cards is less surprising. But hold that thought. All of this comes courtesy of a new book on Nvidia, The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant.
Author Tae Kim reveals that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang invited executives to pitch ideas for his SIGGRAPH 2018 keynote just two weeks before the show. Huang was looking for something to really blow the audience away.
One suggestion was a new DLAA or Deep Learning approach to anti-aliasing. But it wasn't enough for Huang. «A better-looking picture is not going to sell many GPUs,» he is said to have mused.
But the suggestion gave Huang an idea. «Instead of deep-learning anti-aliasing, which improved already great images, what if they could use Tensor cores to make lower-end cards perform as well as the top of the line?» Kim says, explaining Huang's reasoning.
«Nvidia could use the image-enhancement function to sample and interpolate additional pixels, so that a card designed to render graphics natively at 1,440p resolution, also known as 'Quad HD,' could produce images at the higher-resolution 4K, „Ultra HD,“ at a similar frame rate. AΙ would be used to fill in details to take the lower-resolution 1440p image to a higher-resolution 4K image,» Kim reveals.
«What would really help,» Kim says Huang exclaimed, «is if you could do deep-learning super sampling. That would be a big deal. Can you do that?» Apparently, Nvidia Research's Aaron Lefohn replied that it might be possible.
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