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

Tea Cozy · 2026-03-20T23:25:00+0000

Showcasing the most realistic graphics available has been a selling point of those EA sports games for years.

It would be quite a stretch to argue that their millions of consumers don’t want photorealism.

Besides Nvidia claims developers can program the tech to do toon shaders and other stylization for other kinds of games.

Gradine · 2026-03-20T23:30:57+0000

I will admit that the title of this thread is a bit hyperbolic and ultimately false; top 5 maybe, but worst? Considering what we now know about the origins of microtransactions?

trappedslider · 2026-03-20T23:44:48+0000

Gradine said:
I will admit that the title of this thread is a bit hyperbolic and ultimately false; top 5 maybe, but worst? Considering what we now know about the origins of microtransactions?

and we don't know what the final publically available to actual consumers version will look like and how it will impact what games will look like. For me this is a tech demo much like all of the robot demos where the robot falls over.

Tea Cozy · 2026-03-20T23:58:43+0000

trappedslider said:
and we don't know what the final publically available to actual consumers version will look like and how it will impact what games will look like. For me this is a tech demo much like all of the robot demos where the robot falls over.

Like we barely saw any motion. Plus, they can’t release it if it only works well on two 5090s.

Like Bethesda said, “it’s very early.” Me, I just know that it improved those Starfield NPCs. It seems Bethesda knows it too by the looks of things.

Justice and Rule · 2026-03-21T00:07:34+0000

bsss said:
Well, hang on here. If the artists (or their studios) choose to use/enable this feature of DLSS 5, are they erasing their own work? Is this the objection, that such an output is considered unauthentic, and if so, whose authenticity are we talking about?

I mean, kind of, yes. It's generative AI, so there's no actual consistency to the work, you just get what it outputs at that time. At some level, it has to strip away some intent because the AI can't actually take those things into account: it'll just paint it with whatever comes out. Artistic intent by Azathoth, I suppose.

bsss said:
So it's not about the authenticity of the creative vision, but that the games you want to play are owned by corporations, and those executives are motivated by money? And now DLSS 5 allows them --- dwarfing consideration of any other executive decisions they could make and that are made every day right now --- to make a product you don't want to play?

Like, you're trying for some weird rhetorical checkmate in some way, but it's pretty easy to say that "Yes, this money-making endeavor strips away some of the artistic intent of developer whose games I might be interested in and makes the product much less appealing to me given the output of the product and the expense necessary for the product to exist." Like, this is not an "or" situation as much as an "and" situation. I can be interested in a product a corporation makes and also be angry at decisions that they make with it.

I mean, have you looked at the main subforum on this board? I'm fairly sure it's not a particularly uncommon opinion to be expressed around here.

Justice and Rule · 2026-03-21T00:11:19+0000

Tea Cozy said:
Like we barely saw any motion. Plus, they can’t release it if it only works well on two 5090s.

Like Bethesda said, “it’s very early.” Me, I just know that it improved those Starfield NPCs. It seems Bethesda knows it too by the looks of things.

Eh, in motion it does not look better. This video goes over it (including showing off where they mess up Grace's face), and in motion it has a whole lot of artifacting that makes it look worse. All the sort of AI stuff you've come to expect, with random morphs of solid objects to things ghosting in and out of existence...

Again, it really feels like a lot of people at NVidia really need to justify all this spending on AI, and there are studio execs who are willing to play ball with the company that basically has a monopoly on the GPU market right now.

Tea Cozy · 2026-03-21T00:27:08+0000

Justice and Rule said:
Eh, in motion it does not look better.

Which is why we didn’t see much of it. This thing has a ways to go.

Justice and Rule · 2026-03-21T00:50:38+0000

Tea Cozy said:
Which is why we didn’t see much of it. This thing has a ways to go.

If it has any more to go at all. Sometimes technology hits a dead end. All the problems here are ones that are still endemic with AI, and trying to do real-time generation on something that is dynamic like a game is way harder than rendering something that is a static (i.e. not responding to real-time inputs) scene. We can talk about how bad the Instagram filter and blast lighting looks, but that misses all the problems that occur when motion is added, and then even more when real-time inputs come into play. Combined with the overall processing cost, and I'm not sure DLSS5 ends up being the same product when it's released.

trappedslider · 2026-03-21T01:28:38+0000

Justice and Rule said:
If it has any more to go at all. Sometimes technology hits a dead end.

That's very true,just look at NFTs,which had a high point and then crashed like a rock into the moon, even the blockchain hyped dead.

bsss · 2026-03-21T03:25:36+0000

Justice and Rule said:
I mean, kind of, yes. It's generative AI, so there's no actual consistency to the work, you just get what it outputs at that time. At some level, it has to strip away some intent because the AI can't actually take those things into account: it'll just paint it with whatever comes out. Artistic intent by Azathoth, I suppose.

View attachment 432440

Like, you're trying for some weird rhetorical checkmate in some way, but it's pretty easy to say that "Yes, this money-making endeavor strips away some of the artistic intent of developer whose games I might be interested in and makes the product much less appealing to me given the output of the product and the expense necessary for the product to exist." Like, this is not an "or" situation as much as an "and" situation. I can be interested in a product a corporation makes and also be angry at decisions that they make with it.

I mean, have you looked at the main subforum on this board? I'm fairly sure it's not a particularly uncommon opinion to be expressed around here.

I'm not trying for a gotcha, just trying to explore how "somebody made something in a way I don't agree with" is the "worst thing to ever happen to video games". It seems like the "artistic vision" argument only holds water if you believe that someone else (the artists here) agrees with your vision of their work. That they would reject, say, preferring visual fidelity (even if generative) over source accuracy, to the point that it's not a possibility worth consideration. If a dev picked the technology because they thought it gave them a leg up or solved a problem they couldn't solve, is the argument that they're not a true artist? That they must have compromised themselves? Or is it only bad when a corporation does it? Because if so, boy, do I have a long list of worse corporate decisions happening right now in the gamedev world than "this demoed feature that most people can't even use sucks".

And all this handwringing about artistic vision being compromised over the use of a tool is to never mind that consumers can vote with their wallets, this is about the right kind of art?

I actually think the tech used on faces here looks like crap and I said so up front. I actually agree with a lot of the visual analysis in the scraps of a demo we've seen. I think Digital Foundry looks like absolute clowns in all of this. I'd never buy a game based on this feature. I certainly have no reason to respect a single word that dribbles out of Jensen Hueng's mouth as lead snake-oil bottle producer. But to be this angry about a tool --- a demo of a tool to use optionally in the future --- under the pretense of "artistic vision" does not stand up to any scrutiny as far as I'm concerned, other than the pretense being a better excuse than "I don't like this and I'm very angry online about it".