On Monday, Nvidia revealed DLSS 5, the next version of its suite of upscaling and performance-boosting tech used mostly in PC games. In the past, people have celebrated DLSS. This time around, it seemed that just about everyone online hated the AI slop faces and radical visual changes DLSS 5 added to games like Starfield.
After talking to a bunch of developers and reading other devs’ comments online, it seems the people who make games also aren’t on board for Nvidia’s AI-enhanced future.
‘A misguided attempt at realism’
“I think [DLSS 5] is the perfect example of the disconnect between what we as developers and gamers want and what the nasty freaks who are destroying the world and consolidating all wealth into the hands of the few using GPUs think we want,” Cullen Dwyer, gameplay/tech design lead at Doinksoft, told Kotaku.
“Presenting this technology under the DLSS name, thereby implying it will be the default and standard, is insulting and scary, and my immediate kneejerk response is ‘Thank fucking god I make 2D games.’ If I have to make a 3D game, I’m writing a software renderer, fuck NVIDIA, fuck these ghouls.”
Andi Santagata, a former AAA game dev and indie game maker, told Kotaku that, besides DLSS 5’s troubling tendency for “yass-ifying” faces, he was worried that this tech would interfere with artistic intent.
“Aside from the obvious aesthetic issues,” said Santagata, “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.”
Another developer, SolidPLasma, shared with me similar fears about the original artistic vision of a game being altered by DLSS 5.
“It feels like a misguided attempt at realism,” said SolidPlasma. “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.”
A dev with over 15 years of experience working on AAA games who didn’t want to share their name publicly told Kotaku that DLSS5 “feels like it is taking away some authorial intent from artists by making characters more glamorous and environments more detailed, with the overall look appearing to be less distinct or aesthetically cohesive than the original intent.”
This same point, that the AI-powered DLSS 5 ruins or alters artistic intention, was shared by Karla Ortiz on Bluesky shortly after Nvidia showed off the new tech.
“This is so disrespectful to the intentional art direction of devs,” said Ortiz. “If devs wanted to lean in to hyper realism, they would.”
“This also drastically changes key aspects of visuals like character features, focal points, lighting, and so on. What a terrible invention. Nvidia should shelve this one. Imagine being a dev team working for months/years to create characters whose carefully crafted features and body language tell specific stories, with the exact detail and lighting setups that perfectly fit the story and overall game world. For slop to shit all over that carefully balanced work.”
On YouTube, former Red Dead Redemption 2 developer Mike York reacted negatively while watching the DLSS 5 reveal video. His concerns were also about how drastically it changed the intent of the devs and artists who made the original game.
“Whoa. Hold on. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said York. “This isn’t just some lighting, dude. What the fuck. I’m telling you, this is like a complete AI re-render. You’re no longer looking at the game anymore. Does that make sense? This is scary.”
‘They’re completely wrong’
Following the reveal and all the of the online backlash from fans and devs, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke to the press during a Q&A and was asked to respond to fears that DLSS 5 will lead to video game visuals becoming homogenized.
“Well, first of all, they’re completely wrong,” said Huang of the technology’s critics. “The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI.”
“All of that is in the control — direct control — of the game developer. This is very different than generative AI; it’s content-control generative AI. That’s why we call it neural rendering.”
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.
Every dev I talked to, even those who didn’t want to be included in this feature, all told me they hated DLSS 5 and were offended by Nvidia’s announcement and how it seemingly overwrote the work of talented artists, modelers, and other game devs.
Reportedly, even the devs involved with some of the games featured in Nvidia’s DLSS 5 announcement aren’t happy about the AI-powered tech. Insider Gaming reported on Wednesday that some developers at studios like Ubisoft and Capcom were caught off guard by Nvidia’s big reveal.
“We found out at the same time as the public,” one Ubisoft developer told the outlet.
Bethesda was also quick to backtrack a bit despite Todd Howard being directly involved in the announcement of DLSS 5 on Monday.
‘Nobody wants this’
Something I encountered while listening to devs speak about DLSS 5 is that many of them aren’t even sure who this is for. And as pointed out by other devs, Nvidia is fueling the AI datacenter craze that is leading to PC parts getting more expensive and hard to buy, which in turn means far fewer people will even be able to enjoy DLSS 5 when it rolls out.
“The average gamer is unable to afford the hardware that will make DLSS 5 a reasonable offering,” said Dwyer. “In pursuing ‘photorealism’ or whatever they think this slop abomination is, they have created an ecosystem where the most economically viable game is one that can run on low-end hardware. Low poly indie PS1 horror games, stay winning.”
“What the fuck, Nvidia? No. Nobody wants this,” posted Dusk and Iron Lung creator David Szymanski on BlueSky.
One dev who wished to remain anonymous told Kotaku, “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?”
Nuclear Throne, Ridiculous Fishing, and Australia Did It developer Rami Ismail told Kotaku that while previous versions of DLSS were “perhaps a bit misguided,” they at least fulfilled a need. But he doesn’t think DLSS 5 is something “anyone was waiting for.”
“One of my big dreams,” said Ismail, “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.”
“I cannot imagine any reason Nvidia would be pursuing this beyond really needing every possible pipeline of every possible industry to be so overflowing with slop that they can keep investors convinced there will indeed be a need for more Nvidia products in the big slop centers being built with people’s retirement funds. This has nothing to do with games, it has nothing to do with game developers, and it has nothing to do with gamers.”
Perhaps the most upsetting story I heard was not from a published game developer, but instead from a young person who is currently studying game development at a college in the United States. They wished to remain anonymous as well, but told me that every day on campus is filled with people going on and on about AI. The DLSS 5 news hit them hard.
“When I saw the DLSS 5 news and screenshots, I felt ill,” said the game dev student. “I have become used to a nonstop wave of horrible news so I wasn’t particularly shocked, but it was more like another punch in a long and drawn-out beating with no end in sight. News about AI hits particularly hard as it feels like a fundamental irreversible erosion not just of the industry, or my passion for game development, but of the human condition itself.”
“It’s not an over exaggeration to say what DLSS 5 represents has taken a serious toll on my mental health. Most tech feels like the pursuit of knowledge by passionate and obsessive individuals…This feels like an artless desecration of the medium itself by a company with a stranglehold on the global economy,” said the student.
“Between dealing with minority oppression, general uncertainty, and the rush to replace artists and those who pursued knowledge with machines, it feels like there is no future for me or my craft.”
