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> From everything I've heard and seen, it seems like XeSS/FSR/DLSS are all making steady progress and the internal rendering resolutions being lower than what's on your screen is no longer such an issue, with more and more improvements being made.

That's nice, but doesn't really fix the issue of them not being available in every game, or it varying which one even is available.

> There's no reason why you couldn't have the game be upscaled to whatever the stream resolution is from something a bit more performance friendly, with the quality still being good enough (given that some video artifacts will be there anyways) and things like text/UI being legible.

If you're just going to upscale the final image without any internal cooperation from the game, there is no reason to upscale a 720p game and stream 1080p when you could simply stream 720p instead and have the client do the upscaling, unless of course you are using an upscaler that chokes on video artifacts (in which case you probably shouldn't even have video artifacts, it's 2024 and H265/AV1 exist).

> Once game engines like Unity/Unreal/Godot get support for the upscalers out of the box, I think the technology will be even more commonplace.

Don't they all already support it out of the box? It just needs cooperation from the game dev, like I said.

For example, Pacific Drive uses UE4, not even UE5, and still supports DLSS. It almost works fine, except displays (such as the ones in the car and garage) flicker and shimmer under DLSS because the devs didn't implement them in a way that works with the upscaler.

This can't just be solved by the engine, since DLSS integrates multiple different views of the game (depth buffer, motion buffer, etc) and the dev needs to make sure all of these views are faithful to the effects they're actually showing on-screen, else bugs like that will just happen.

That specific problem could be solved by running the game at native-720 and then using a naïve upscaler such as FSR on the output framebuffer, but that's going to be a significant visual tradeoff compared to if DLSS were implemented correctly. Upscaling isn't magic, but FSR (upscaling the final render output) is even less magic than DLSS (upscaling multiple intermediate artifacts).

And games often omit settings from their menus, even those that work perfectly well in the engine itself. Having upscaling implemented by the engine doesn't necessarily mean the dev cares enough to implement the setting for it and test it.