[jms55]

For people not familiar with how ML is being used by games, checkout this great and very recent SIGGRAPH 2025 course https://dl.acm.org/doi/suppl/10.1145/3721241.3733999. Slides are in the supplementary material section, and code is at https://github.com/shader-slang/neural-shading-s25.

Neural nets are great for replacing manually-written heuristics or complex function approximations, and 3d rendering is _full_ of these heuristics. Texture compression, light sampling, image denoising/upscaling/antialiasing, etc.

Actual "generative" API in graphics is pretty rare, at least currently. That's more of an artist thing. But there's a lot of really great use cases for small neural networks (think 3-layer MLPs, absolutely nowhere near LLM-levels of size) to approximate expensive or manually-tuned heuristics in existing rendering pipeline, and it just so happens that the GPUs used for rendering also now come with dedicated NPU accelerator things.