GTA V is still one of the most popular games on PC. Part of that popularity is due to the mods , which allow you to enhance the game by taking advantage of its excellent gameplay base, graphics and open world. Roleplay mods have caught on with servers like Marbella Vice, and now a new mod further enhances the realism of the game.
The mod has been developed by researchers at Intel Labs , who have used the game as the basis for developing a study that aims to develop photorealistic images of games by analyzing factors such as light intensity, color, shadows and a long list of elements.
Real images as a basis for modifying the game
There are many GTA V mods that have sought to create photorealistic images, but none to date have allowed you to see images that look like they were taken from a real car dashcam. Intel Labs explains that each image has been enhanced with a convolutional neural network that takes advantage of intermediate representations made by conventional rendering.
The model used the captured images of GTA V gameplay , and changed the color and lighting based on a database a dashcam located on the dashboard of a car in which they circulated through German cities . Thus, although the game loses that colorful tone it has, the images seem totally real as we can see in the following video.
Games should improve their default colors
This study shows where video games are going to go from now on. One of the main design flaws that many games have is that they use a disastrous color palette and lighting, which are not only very far from reality, but are also highly improvable by users.
For many years now, one of the most convenient ways to improve color in games was to use SweetFX , which allowed users to apply a series of reshade filters to games to improve sharpness, color, contrast, and even insert blur. However, as games have become more demanding not to allow the introduction of third-party tools, many games already prevent it from being used. For this reason, NVIDIA created its own tool with Filters for games to be able to make changes to games natively.
Thus, it is not surprising that many users have asked Intel to release this reshade in the form of a mod. When using an AI to process images, it would not be unusual for something similar to come out in the next few years that could take advantage of the Tensor Cores of graphics cards to do real-time AI tasks related to improving image quality.
