The CEO of Nvidia has fired back at outspoken critics of the recent DLSS 5 review, saying the complaints about the technology are “completely wrong.” The response comes just a day after Nvidia’s reveal of DLSS 5, showing that the gaming community’s complaints have quickly been recognized.
DLSS 5 is the newest iteration of the Nvidia-specific DLSS technology, which has been available on RTX-branded Nvidia GPUs. Previous iterations of the technology have done things like upscaling lower resolutions. This allows players to play graphically-demanding games with less lag while still maintaining good visuals. However, the reveal of DLSS 5 has been anything but completely greeted with open arms by the gaming community, with players lobbing numerous complaints against the recent tech demo demonstrating its impact on games like Resident Evil Requiem. Players have particularly complained that the altered images look like “AI slop” and bear too strong a resemblance to existing AI-generated images, which can have a homogenous appearance.
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Nvidia CEO Responds to DLSS 5 Criticism
In a chat with Tom Hardware, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded to the recent DLSS 5 complaints and shared his counterpoints. When asked about the criticism, he replied “Well, first of all, they’re completely wrong,” going on to say that “DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI.” He noted that developers have control over the AI, and are able to fine-tune it. Further, he added that DLSS 5 isn’t performing post-processing, it’s “generative control at the geometry level,” adding generative capability to the game’s inherent mesh geometry.
Huang added that it’s ultimately up to the developers to decide how they want to use DLSS 5’s AI capabilities, indicating that it can do a lot more than touch up lighting and visuals. He claims that developers could utilize DLSS 5 to do things like create a toon shader, or make a game “of glass.” He concluded that DLSS 5 is “very different than generative AI,” referring to it as “content-control generative AI.”
DLSS 5 isn’t set to release until sometime in the fall, so it’s likely that the technology will continue to evolve. More refined examples of what it can do may help to ease the concerns of gamers. Some of the early complaints regarding the before and after comparisons were that they too heavily changed the faces of the characters, with some particularly pointing to Grace from Resident Evil Requiem as looking like she has a beauty filter applied. Players have also pointed to curiosities like her makeup looking different, though this could be due to the changes in lighting. However, there’s also a distinct difference with her hair, as the DLSS 5-enabled version of Grace has prominent dark roots, whereas in the original, she looks as though her hair is largely shades of blonde.
Though opinions on this technology may shift over time, it’s also understandable that gamers are expressing discontent at the reveal. AI has been a sore spot for gamers in recent times due to the increased demand for hardware parts to power AI datacenters, which has led to RAM and SSD shortages for consumers and increasing prices. Some manufacturers of these parts have simply left the consumer market altogether to purely cater to AI companies, further compounding the problem. These issues have led to delays in opening Steam Machine pre-orders, and it’s possible that the prices of consoles like the Nintendo Switch 2 could go up due to its components becoming more expensive for the manufacturer.
With the potential for the cost of gaming to go up considerably and shortages to be the new normal, it’s likely that many players’ opinions on the new AI-powered DLSS 5 technology — and any AI-powered tech — will remain sour. Though DLSS 5 will release later this year, plenty of gamers may not actually get to try it for themselves for a long time regardless. The recent tech demo utilized dual Nvidia 5090 GPUs, which have an MSRP of $1999 each, but have recently been selling for even more, putting it out of range of all but the highest-spec gaming PCs. While a future GPU will likely handle the technology better than what’s currently available, there’s no telling if the price will be more reasonable or even higher.
