AMD presents new method of handing indirect lighting off to an image generation model: 'frame-by-frame' solution could be part of AMD's answer to DLSS 5 someday

AMD promised neural rendering is coming to Radeon cards and consoles with FSR Diamond, and we're starting to see signs of that new approach in the works from the red team. The company's technical staff just published a paper on how it's using image generation to replace global illumination in real-time.

The paper outlines a technique for generating more realistic-looking lighting on a frame-by-frame basis. It's titled "Temporally stable generative illumination with a one-step diffusion model". Diffusion models create images by working through a noisy image, often over many steps; however, AMD's researchers are using one that produces an image in one denoising step, using the details and lighting baked into a scene to generate a new one. That's important for being able to run it quickly.

The idea is to produce something that looks like global illumination—indirect light bouncing off objects and illuminating stuff nearby—through image generatio...