NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 demos have done most of the damage so far. At the GTC presentation in March, DLSS 5 was crushed Resident Evil Requiem And Star Fieldbut viewers immediately noticed that characters like The Requiem Leon Kennedy and Grace Ashcroft presented smoothed, glowing faces that, instead of being photorealistic, looked like a beauty filter, “yassified” becoming the Internet term for the effect. The most liked comment in NVIDIA’s reveal video, comparing the output to an AI-generated image, exceeds the video’s number of likes, with another user joking: “We made it, everything now looks like a YouTube thumbnail.” Within a day, arguments that gamers are right to be disgusted by NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 were everywhere demos were shared.
In response to backlash over the reveal video, an NVIDIA representative wrote that “game developers have complete and detailed artistic control” over DLSS 5 to “ensure they maintain their game’s unique aesthetic.”
The backlash against DLSS 5 extends well beyond aesthetics, with several notable artists and developers questioning NVIDIA’s intention with the software. Karla Ortiz, an artist who has worked with Ubisoft and Blizzard, wrote on Bluesky that the technology is “so disrespectful of the developers’ intentional art direction”, arguing that studios who wanted hyperrealism would have built it themselves. Valid arguments have also been made about convergence: if hundreds of games go through the same model trained on the same idea of realism, their distinct appearances begin to blur. Bethesda responded early Star Field images saying that its artistic teams will fix the effect and that it will be optional for players, while Capcom apparently did not know (!) that its game would appear in the demo.
Huang unfortunately made things much worse before making them better, responding that “Well, first of all, they’re completely wrong,” when asked about the criticism during a Q&A with GTC. His argument was that DLSS 5 works on a geometric level under the full control of the developer rather than as a filter applied to finished images.
Since the build leaked in late August, players have been injecting it into everything from Control has Rise of the Monster Hunters. Early testers criticized the Control image quality and performance cost of the mod, but the same clips impressed enough players that TechRadar reported the first signs of a “negative trend reversal”. DLSS 5 is expected to be officially released this fall, with developer-friendly implementations that will show whether NVIDIA’s claims about developer control hold up better than its demos.
