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.
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.