Rebuilding Hogwarts using AI

Hey y’all, it’s Austin Carr in Boston. Nvidia’s artificial intelligence technology isn’t just revolutionizing chatbots and data centers. But [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hey y’all, it’s Austin Carr in Boston. Nvidia’s artificial intelligence technology isn’t just revolutionizing chatbots and data centers. But first... Three things you need to know today: • A SpaceX tender offer [valued the company at about $150 billion]( • Belgium ordered Binance to [stop operating in the country]( • Life sciences firm Abcam is [exploring a sale]( Missing pixels This week, Nvidia Corp. is releasing the GeForce RTX 4060. We wouldn’t ordinarily write about a mid-range graphics card, but the product highlights how the chipmaker’s investments in AI have paid dividends to its core business of video games. Nvidia has said the new processor series will deliver massive performance boosts to games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Microsoft Flight Simulator, thanks to an AI feature called deep learning super sampling, or DLSS. With so much hype around how Nvidia’s chips are powering ChatGPT and other consumer AI apps, it’s easy to forget that gaming remains a big part of the company’s sales, generating billions of dollars a quarter. As was evident after a slew of executive interviews for a [recent profile of the company]( in Bloomberg Businessweek, AI only appears to be enhancing that effort. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has suggested DLSS will revolutionize how computer graphics are processed. “DLSS is essentially predicting a missing pixel,” Huang told me. He compared the technology to how AI language models select the next word in sentence: “We should be able to predict the next pixel.” It’s a complicated concept, but DLSS basically relies on AI to generate frames in a video game, instead of the traditional way, which is more processor intensive. Think of it like how your brain remembers what’s in your periphery. When you turn your head, your eyes aren’t processing what you’re looking at again as if you’ve never seen those surroundings before. A game like [Hogwarts Legacy]( can use DLSS to guess what imagery to display, enabling the stone steps and mahogany walls of the wizarding school to render much faster, at least in theory. Nvidia has said this can more than double or triple performance in some games. When DLSS was first introduced in 2018, it was [widely panned](. In the first-person shooter Battlefield V, reviewers found that textures were blurry, and performance improvements were negligible. Part of the problem was that engineers had to develop custom AI models, a complex and costly undertaking. “We can’t have the model specific to, ‘Call of Duty looks this way, and Doom looks this other way,’” said Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s vice president for applied deep-learning research. “It would take thousands of people to collect the training data and build the models individually for each of these games.” The team realized Nvidia needed to develop a single, general model that could function across a variety of games while allowing each one to retain unique aesthetics. They spent two years programming the second iteration of DLSS. Whereas the first version used a neural network to learn what pixels to show next, DLSS 2 much more effectively guesses what pixels to retain from the previous frame. For example, if you’re looking at a brick building in the distance in Battlefield, it should look much sharper than before because the system reuses similar pixels rather than redrawing them. “The model is given the bricks as they looked a few milliseconds ago,” Catanzaro said, “and it has to decide how much of the past to keep. Often the answer is almost all of it.” Although it’s still far from perfect, and critics have griped about visual stutters in heavy rendering workloads, dozens of big games have adopted the latest iteration of DLSS. The hope is it will bring major frame-rate improvements even to lower-end processors such as the GeForce RTX 4060. When optimized correctly, this approach can result in huge efficiency gains, Catanzaro said: “Seven out of every eight pixels are being generated by these models.” —[Austin Carr](mailto:acarr54@bloomberg.net) The big story A document from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which the agency said it mistakenly released unredacted in response to a Bloomberg News public information request, provides one of the most detailed glimpses yet into [Silicon Valley Bank’s big customers](. One to watch [Watch the Bloomberg Technology TV interview]( with Halle Berry and Colleen Cutcliffe on their company Pendulum Therapeutics. Get fully charged London’s electricity system is said to be struggling to add more data centers, deterring potential investment and [undermining Britain’s ambitions in AI](. Cyberattacks on US hospitals are on the rise, [adding a layer of financial pressure]( onto an industry still struggling to recover from the pandemic. Think & Learn Pvt lost three board directors representing its most prominent shareholders, [the latest setback for the troubled Indian ed-tech firm]( better known as Byju’s. Mainspring Energy’s generator is a new way to create clean electricity and runs on hydrogen. [Practically no one has heard of it](. Nikola suspects “foul play” after an early-morning [fire broke out at its Phoenix headquarters](. More from Bloomberg Get Bloomberg Tech newsletters in your inbox: - [Cyber Bulletin]( for coverage of the shadow world of hackers and cyber-espionage - [Game On]( for reporting on the video game business - [Power On]( for Apple scoops, consumer tech news and more - [Screentime]( for a front-row seat to the collision of Hollywood and Silicon Valley - [Soundbite]( for reporting on podcasting, the music industry and audio trends - [Hyperdrive]( for expert insight into the future of cars Follow Us Like getting this newsletter? 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