With you there. The workload on developers is reduced with these features, to a degree. But, instead of saved effort then getting directed to working on gameplay mechanics and such, to me it feels like many devs just see it as time/money saved, producing a game that looks and plays like one from 10 years ago, but runs like it's cutting edge.
For instance, Abiotic Factor. That game on my RX 6800 XT runs at 40-50fps when at 100% resolution scaling at 1440p. Why? It's got the fidelity of Half Life 1, why does it need temporal upscaling to run better? (I adore that game btw, Abiotic Factor is so much fun and worth getting even if playing alone!)
Not saying that's how every dev is, I know there are plenty of games coming out nowadays that look and run great with creators that care. Just feels like there are too many games that rely on these machine learning based features too heavily, resulting in blurriness, smearing, shimmering, on top of poorer performance.
Just hoping the expectation that something like an RTX 4090 does not become the default cost-of-entry in order to play PC games because of this. It would be unfortunate for the ability of game developers to create and tune by-hand to become a lost art.
