DLSS 5 will be the worst thing to EVER happen to video games

Spectral Anomaly · 2026-03-19T14:53:20+0000

Tea Cozy said:
Bethesda on Twitter:

Again for those in the back: “This will all be under our artists’ control, and totally optional for players.”

There is a whole developer side to the tech. This isn’t like modders on Nexus Mods yassifying BG3 characters. If characters in the future end up looking a certain way, it’s because the developers want them to.

I think it's pretty obvious that those artists and game developers don't understand what role they play in the creation of these games.

(/s as if it was really necessary. On second thought, yes, it was really necessary.)

Gradine · 2026-03-19T17:08:33+0000

Tea Cozy said:
And can I just say that there is no chin widening, nose alteration, or lip inflation going on in this set of images.

View attachment 432319

If you can say these things then there is simply no way you are looking at the same set of images. That is very clearly a different face, with a different nose, different lips, different cheekbones, different eyebrows, makeup...

Art direction is an incredibly important piece of the whole when it comes to video game design and I'm not willing or happy to just throw it out because someone thinks a generative model can "do it better" and I'm certainly not going to shell out thousands of dollars for the "privilege"

Gradine · 2026-03-19T17:23:05+0000

For the "I'm sure that the devs would love to have their games look like this" folks:

We Spoke To Game Devs And All Of Them Hate DLSS 5: 'What The F***, Nvidia?'

One game developer told Kotaku that after seeing DLSS 5, 'it feels like there is no future for me' in the video game industry

kotaku.com

Some of my favorite quotes from actual game devs, for those who don't have the time to read the full article:

"Aside from the obvious aesthetic issues, one of the other big problems is how DLSS 5 basically sucks the personality out of any artistic choice the devs have made by making average-out guesses of what it thinks things should look like. Like, you’re never going to get the devs’ actual intent with this thing turned on.”

“It feels like a misguided attempt at realism... a style that I personally feel is a dead end. In attempting to make characters appear more human, it removes everything original about their designs, and more often than not, whitewashes them.”

"People debate if video games are ‘art,’ but I prefer to see video games as galleries. Every game has many different forms of art within. Animation and sound design are separate yet complementary pieces of art. Although separate, every piece works together to create a full, cohesive product. [DLSS 5] deconstructs the gallery. It breaks away one piece of the full experience and returns a game into segmented elements. It won’t ruin a game, but it does destroy its purest expression, and to that, all I have to ask is, what is the point?"

“One of my big dreams, when I first became an independent game developer almost 2 decades ago is to have a megacorporation smear the most dystopian slop all over what is generally two to three years of my life’s work while shushing into my ear that I’m in full artistic control... This has nothing to do with games, it has nothing to do with game developers, and it has nothing to do with gamers.”

Gradine · 2026-03-19T17:26:58+0000

Lowkey reminds me of this nonsense from a few years back:

trappedslider · 2026-03-19T17:37:38+0000

me over here downloading mods so that bethesda's npcs look better

Tea Cozy · 2026-03-19T18:24:38+0000

Gradine said:
For the "I'm sure that the devs would love to have their games look like this" folks:

We Spoke To Game Devs And All Of Them Hate DLSS 5: 'What The F***, Nvidia?'

One game developer told Kotaku that after seeing DLSS 5, 'it feels like there is no future for me' in the video game industry

kotaku.com

Some of my favorite quotes from actual game devs, for those who don't have the time to read the full article:

From the same article:

“And while it does seem to be true that devs will have a choice for when or when not to support or use DLSS 5, that doesn’t change that the tech has spooked and grossed out a lot of folks who make games.”

Kotaku posted a lot of quotes from devs reacting to essentially misinformation, admitted they were misinformed, then said “but they were spooked, which is the important part.”

They also talked to mostly indie devs who aren’t going to use the tech, and criticize and disregard companies and consumers who would like a detailed, realistic look.

“If devs wanted to lean in to hyper realism, they would.” Plenty do, and are frustrated by technical limitations.

“A style I personally feel is a dead end.”

So these devs will simply not use it.

Different quotes from different article:

“I was in the room and I went hands-on. Not watching a sizzle reel, not scrubbing through a carefully curated 30-second trailer, but sitting in front of multiple games with DLSS 5 toggling on and off in real time.”

“When developers previewed the technology, their technical artists were apparently co-advocating for it internally, because it gets them closer to what they actually intended their characters and environments to look like when they were designing them in their authoring tools. Then those assets get dropped into a real-time game engine with a finite performance budget, and compromises happen. DLSS 5 lets them claw back some of what gets lost in that translation.”

Again: “When developers previewed the technology, their technical artists were apparently co-advocating for it internally, because it gets them closer to what they actually intended their characters and environments to look like”

Artists advocating for the tech to help them achieve the look they want.

“DLSS 5 isn't NVIDIA applying its stylistic choices on top of someone else's game. It's providing a tool that helps developers close the gap between what they can render in 16 milliseconds and what they actually want the player to see. That's a meaningful distinction, and it's a big reason why the developer response has been positive.”

https://www.techspot.com/news/111719-saw-dlss-5-running-across-multiple-games-not.html

Tea Cozy · 2026-03-19T18:34:23+0000

Gradine said:
If you can say these things then there is simply no way you are looking at the same set of images. That is very clearly a different face, with a different nose, different lips, different cheekbones, different eyebrows, makeup...

Are you are saying the added details and lighting depth give the illusion of difference? Because the face model itself very clearly wasn’t physically changed.

I am just trying to understand your view here.

nyvinter · 2026-03-19T18:45:24+0000

Tea Cozy said:
Are you are saying the added details and lighting depth give the illusion of difference? Because the face model itself very clearly wasn’t physically changed.

In a way it does since DLSS 5 don't care about existing light sources and how the face geometry blocks with light/shadow. So it's super-imposes a new face on top of the old.

But on the other hand, Nvidia's CEO says "It's not post-processing, it's not post-processing at the frame level, it's generative control at the geometry level."

Gladius Legis · 2026-03-19T18:53:55+0000

Tea Cozy said:
From the same article:

So Kotaku posts a lot of quotes from devs reacting to essentially misinformation, admit they were misinformed, but say “but they were spooked, which is the important part.”

They also talked to mostly indie devs who aren’t going to use the tech, and criticize and disregard companies and consumers who would like a detailed, realistic look.

“If devs wanted to lean in to hyper realism, they would.” Plenty do, and are frustrated by technical limitations.

“A style I personally feel is a dead end.”

So these devs will simply not use it.

Different quotes from different article:

Artists advocating for the tech to help them achieve the look they want.

https://www.techspot.com/news/111719-saw-dlss-5-running-across-multiple-games-not.html

Yeaaaaaaahhh ... I'm gonna trust actual developer quotes over that one other editorial (not article) you quoted, all of which is one guy (the author of that article) and his opinions.

Also at the end of what you linked, as if it wasn't clear already:

This opinion piece was originally published on X and is reproduced here with permission.

As for why actual devs would be spooked even if they (supposedly) have control over how DLSS 5 is applied, I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the real possibility that the higher-ups in charge will see it as another justification to cut dev jobs. /s