A classic Nintendo handheld turned 25 this week amidst an ongoing bust-up about the very future of graphics tech, an anniversary that reminds us how hollow the pursuit of ever increasing graphical fidelity is when all the post-processed path tracing in the world can’t make the driving in Cyberpunk 2077 feel as good as V-Rally 3 on the Game Boy Advance.
Look at it. Squeezing every bit of horsepower out of the GBA’s dinky 16MHz processor, a system explicitly designed to run sprite-based 2D games, V-Rally 3 represents an incredible feat of software engineering: a fully 3D racer conjured from textured polygons, clever art direction, and three entire volts of copper-topped power. This was damn close to PS1 quality gaming you could enjoy on a bus (at a time when the PS1 was still very much a going concern), making the GBA a very early taste of what would be possible decades later, where any lingering distinction between a handheld game and a home console or PC game has been utterly obliterated.
Sure, harsh compromises have to be made, for example, to get The Witcher 3 running on the original Switch, which makes it objectively the worst possible version of that game, but plenty of you loved it all the same and it sold gangbusters. For many of us, having the game running on affordable hardware that you can take to the dunny is more valuable than how sharp it looks. Which rather suggests that anyone willing to sacrifice the concept of art direction on the twin-gpu’d altar of slightly wonky photorealism probably isn’t that in touch with the average game enjoyer.
A suggestion that, as it happens, we have a case study for: the almost total rejection of DLSS 5’s Yassify filter after its controversial unveiling last week. Aside from the usual marks who use Grok as a soothsayer, most people seem distinctly unimpressed with what DLSS 5 has thus far been shown to be capable of. Which mostly seems to be cultural vandalism.
For those of you who have so far remained mercifully out of the loop on this, DLSS 5 is Nvidia’s upcoming technology that seeks to enhance video game graphics by replacing each frame with an AI generated image, using similar technology to that which allows your iPhone to put a hat on the poo emoji, or that bad actors on Facebook are currently using to radicalise your nan against the concept of time.
The same kind of technology, as it happens, that’s so comically unprofitable it just got unceremoniously ripped out of ChatGPT.
The goal of DLSS 5 is to brute-force true photorealism into gaming, which as we all know is the end goal of all computer graphics tech, by slamming it bow-first into the uncanny valley and then somehow dragging it up the other side. Essentially, imagine Werner Herzog was an elaborate Instagram filter. Except don’t imagine that because it would be a grave insult to the man.
One wonders what on earth DLSS 5’s image processing algorithms would even make of V-Rally 3 on the Game Boy Advance. There will no doubt be some way to test it, but the results would scarcely be worth the bother. If you want to play a racing game that strives for photorealism, it’s not like there aren’t thousands of options. It’s of limited academic interest: DLSS 5 is designed to enhance – and I use that word very charitably – graphics that are already of a decent high quality. Something as primitive as V-Rally 3 on the Game Boy Advance probably wouldn’t give it enough clues to adequately guess from. And yet, to the human art enjoyer, its basic, blocky forms coalesce into something beautiful: a proper sense of speed. The knotted stomach of a downhill rush. The rumble of Subaru tyres on Finnish gravel.
V-Rally 3 on the Game Boy Advance is achieved via V3D, a custom game engine developed by coders Fernando Velez, sadly no longer with us, and Guillaume Dubail. These guys made a career out of getting Game Boys to do things they shouldn’t have been able to, and during V-Rally 3’s development it was generally believed that pulling off true 3D graphics on the Advance was more or less impossible. As it turned out, plenty of studios found a way to squeeze or cheat 3D gaming onto it, often employing pseudo-3D techniques as made famous by the original Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, both of which were ported to the system.
But V-Rally 3 was the real deal. No tricks. No Mode 7 scaling or ray projection. These were real 3D tracks with height and depth, not a direct port of the PS2 game it’s based on but something approaching its complexity on a device that shouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near it. Velez and Dubail would go on to do versions of three other PS2 games for the GBA: Asterix & Obelix XXL, Stuntman, and Driver 3. And they’re all technically impressive showcases of the impossible things that the GBA could be made to do in the hands of wizards. But V-Rally 3 is their crowning achievement: a thrilling arcade rally game with simple, unfussy controls, and clean PS1 style presentation. It’s not realistic looking in any sense, but like any good piece of art, it transcends that. It’s about nailing a feeling. In modern parlance, the vibes.
And in the case of DLSS 5, the vibes are distinctly off. Even people willing to give it the benefit of the doubt have a tendency to damn it with faint praise. Some have noted that the model being used is capable of ‘remarkable consistency between frames’ – which is a bit like praising a cat for shitting in the tray. It is morbidly impressive that this thing is processing a live frame buffer and pumping out the “improved” visuals locally, on device, on the fly. But it’s a system that right now requires two of the most expensive GPUs on the market running at once, costing almost six grand more than is necessary to, say, run Starfield on a normal PC that a real person might own. A game you can run perfectly reasonably on a £300 GPU, in a manner where consistency between frames won’t even occur as an issue.
Has there ever been a more damning example of diminishing returns than this wretched “slop filter” that nobody wants? It’s a digital folly: a technology that requires more power to make a game look like it has path-tracing than it takes to do actual path-tracing. Which pulls into sharp focus how misbranded it is as a DLSS feature.
DLSS, along with its copycat technologies such as AMD’s FSR and PlayStation’s PSSR, has always had its detractors. But to be clear, I have never counted myself among them: I’ve always found it quite marvellous. To have real-time raytracing, long considered a holy grail in computer graphics, become achievable by sacrificing small amounts of overall image quality is an incredible trade-off. In a world where Moore’s Law is effectively over, and technological advancement is butting up against the hard laws of physics, intelligent upscaling represents a clever solution for achieving more within those limits. In short, it makes cutting-edge visuals a lot less expensive in terms of clock cycles and quids.
DLSS 5 is completely antithetical to that purpose. The cost of achieving it, literally and figuratively, is astronomical: and for no discernable benefit. Using it doesn’t unlock something previously unobtainable, like real-time path tracing. It merely makes a mockery of everything fed into it, making questionable decisions about lighting and colour composition that make the heartswelling, mist-draped landscapes of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows look like drone footage, that make every NPC character inexplicably edge-lit, ring-lit, and Instagram ready at all times. When its most evident effect is to make a game look like it’s running through Vivid mode on your mum’s telly, considering it an improvement to the source material should count as a mark against you in the Turing test.
DLSS tech and its derivatives are already widely believed to have jeopardised the art of video game optimisation: the worry is that they provide a shortcut for quick-fix performance gains that a developer would previously have had to work a lot harder to achieve at the cost of image quality. Stealing valour with fuzzy edges and fake frames. In reality, this has been happening in some form for years. The Xbox 360 had a built-in scaling chip that gave it a huge performance advantage over PS3 in the early days, but that’s a whole different article
That enthusiast gamers are so passionate about as dry a topic as “game optimisation” speaks to how much we value the handcrafted nature of the medium. That may sound ignorant to the fact it is a medium so directly tied to the development of ever more sophisticated machines, but video games are a deeply human magic: from within the machines, human experiences and human ideas are conjured to be passed among us. And I put it to you that there’s scarcely little more magical than two nerdy French guys coaxing V-Rally 3 onto the Game Boy Advance.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong, maybe this thing looks great and you wanna tell me why. If so, do down below!
Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn’t fawning over Assassin’s Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and eating stuff. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social
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