Anyone who thinks DLSS 5 is a good thing doesn’t understand art. It’s just a filter that removes all artistic intention. Like taking someone else’s artwork, paint all over it, and then claim it’s ”better”.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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That's unfortunately a lot of people going by the amount of "fixed" (ie sloppified) art and photos I see going around online.
All those "filters" are preinstalled and pushed on the users. It's kinda hard to fault them when they push the "make pretty" button, but I do take umbrage when my family members post pictures of "me" online that look like someone else. It's a weird time to be alive.
There was an interesting post that I was linked to on Reddit, supposedly from Assassins Creed dev.
I'll quote it here:
"I been watching the fallout of the DLSS 5 video, and wanted to check in with with some game devs to check if I have been taking crazy pills, or if I have understood game dev incorrectly.
Games are not visuals, they are game mechanics and game loops skinned in visual interface. When we make games, we make all the things that work with our mechanism and loops, visually distinct and more importantly repeatable.
In assassins creed, all ledges that I can climb, look visually distinct from all other ledges. In most games, outlines and color is much more important, than what they look up close. They are used to identify what we are looking at, more than how realistic they look. These things are icons in the world, more than they are objects.
Light and Shadow are not just for visual pleasure, they are used to draw the eye towards objectives and where you should go.
In short, there is information in the visual representation of the game mechanics that are telling players what they should do and where they should go.
When I see video games processed through DLSS 5, I see stripped away game information, making games less playable, and more confusing. I could understand having this in a photo mode, but why on earth should we have this in any of our games, if we don't know what it will change it to? Or if it even will remain consistent next time you look at it?
Will it remove the yellow paint on my assassins creed ledges, or perhaps only up-rez the rest of the assets, and make the yellow ledges stand out like a sore eye? Will it remove scars that are story relevant from an RPG Character? Will it smooth out a wall that is supposed to look like it can be destroyed? There are so many visual important things in games, that I know this thing won't adhere to.
Did no one involved in making this video understand Game Design or Art Design?"
From my understanding, it may be possible to work around some of this, since the program is meant to hook into the game in a number of different ways. Its very possible that an "importance" mask could be added as in input, for example. This wouldn't fix everything, but would still give a way to separate game elements from environmental details.
That said, theres been so much focus on how it looks. IMO, its completely overblown, especially when all of this needs to be manually configued on a game-by-game basis. Devs can tweak the settings to their own preferences, and make things more or less extreme.
The part thats much more worthwhile of mockery is the fact that they're demoing a consumer product on professional grade hardware, during a hardware shortage. They couldn't even get the demo working on a high-end gaming PC, and they think this tech is worth advertising? That is the funny part of all this.
That said, theres been so much focus on how it looks. IMO, its completely overblown, especially when all of this needs to be manually configued on a game-by-game basis. Devs can tweak the settings to their own preferences, and make things more or less extreme.
It's wild that every defense of this bs is "Just have devs spend even more time finetuning for this." Yes, let's double (or more) the workload of artists and programmers that are already overworked and crunched beyond reason, all for a "feature" that looks like garbage in its showcase demo and that's so resource intensive that very few users will be able to utilize it, if they even want to.
Its more an argument against the, "artisit's intent" and "disrupting gameplay" points.
Yes, let's double (or more) the workload of artists and programmers
Do you have any evidence for this? Given whats been shown, this seems relatively easy to implement on the game dev side.
Even if implementing it turns out to be trivial, testing art assets for quality and consistency will be a nightmare. Especially if the underlying generative AI isn't deterministic.
Yes, depending on implementation details. I mean, its never going to be completely consistant, but I don't expect these companies to mind a little brand damage if they get short-term boost in invest.
I'm more thinking that as it stands, the hardware requirements make it DOA for users. They're saying they'll improve it, although I have my doubts. That said, even if no one can run it, it may be popular among publishers for screenshots and marketing. On the other hand, if it does actually double dev costs, then it'll be DOA even for corporate use.
no corporation under capitalism, especially a multibillion dollar one like CAPCOM, is "Anti-AI." GenAI is a get out of jail free card for doing what the games industry has done for years now, pushing more bloated, buggier, and blurrier games while charging more for it. it's also great for devaluing human labour. even if it can't replace it, doesn't matter, that's not the point. you lay off thousands of people, "replace their jobs with AI" and then when that inevitably doesn't work you hire humans again for worse benefits and pay. this is enshittification, and it's the natural process of capitalism.
Guh. Look I'm not against AI, when it's used in a good place. Hot take, DLSS 5.0 features could have an interesting place. HOWEVER, before you mass downvote me
NVidia is not the one to tell when a game should use something like this. This should be used as a fine tuning option if the developer thinks it legitimately will make their games slightly better, and only for super realistic games. I think Cyberpunk, where main characters are all super detailed but background NPCs are more or less fairly low poly and not detailed. It might be good. However, then it comes up against the real kicker, which is that those limitations of those engines and the hardware at the time is what made artists think about their decisions. They made design choices at the time which drove how their game would look. I said in another thread, Master Chief's now iconic armor was because they had such heavy restrictions. It's a few triangles of green at the end of the day.
Added to a few games where it's been tested and fits in the artistic style? I classify that as upscaling, a proven use of AI, and fits within the DLSS brand. Slapped into every game to make all men beefy hunkcakes and all women look like OF models? That's when it's slop.
Sorry Jensen, you're pushing the slop angle, and that makes me sour to the concept.
Honestly i felt the giddiness that DF did in that first video. It was exciting not just because it did look like a huge upgrade to realism -- but because this is another pandoras box moment for genAI. Exciting in a holy shit way, not a "I can't wait" way. Also, I believed it when they said it was just changing the lighting. Looking at the Grace model more, along with peoples comments, there has to be more than lighting going on here. and with Jensens comments, I think that seems clearer.
He really is pushing the slop angle, and, well -- ~~me too~~ I agree with you. I've soured on the whole idea. I think there's been too much backlash toward DF though.
Pffffttttahjahahahahahahah
Is there an add on that re-enables the dislike counter?
There is!
Kind of wild that it's crowd sourced data and still such a severe ratio, thanks for the link!
The extension extrapolates the dislikes based on the YouTube like counter and the ratio of extension users who liked and disliked the video. So the dislike count is based on the extension user's opinion. While I am sure the dislikes overwhelm the likes, I don't think that this is a representation of the real data.
Yes, Return YouTube Dislike made by Dmitry Selivanov basically maintains it's own like/dislike database using like/dislike data from those using the extension, then applies that ratio to the public number of likes to estimate how many total dislikes there are among everyone including those not using the extension, assuming the data from users using the extension is representative of all people who liked/disliked. Overall it works well enough to tell what people's sentiment is, and the more people use it, the closer you get to having the actual number of dislikes.
Surely that only tells you the sentiment of people... who also use the add-on. I don't really see how that can correlate to the overall public sentiment.
It doesn't always! That's why I specifically said it assumes the people using the addon are representative of the overall population.
DLSS has always been a plague.
I think when it was presented over a decade ago now when the claim was that DLSS/FSR was there to give more life into older video cards that was a good thing.
What it's morphed to, where it's a mandatory crutch and now with AI Slop, I do think it's a crap thing.
Yep, existing for old cards would be great, but it was never even supported properly on old cards, instead it became a crutch for game performance on all GPUs and Nvidia started locking newer versions behind their new hardware and paying developers to implement it and advertise it.
I actually like DLSS <= 4.5, when it's well used. It's just a scaling technique, like bilinear or 2xSai, but instead of using a regular mathematical formula to calculate the interpolated pixels, it uses a neural network. Of course the final results vary, depending on how much of the image you interpolate, the training data and if you use previous frame data and stuff like that (motion vectors, etc.).
OTOH, DLSS 5, sloptracing or whatever you want to call it, doesn't seem to be a scaling technique (even if it most likely can do that too). It seems to be a video enhancing technique, with stability features included (anchored to 3d objects) to avoid the common morphing artifacts in early video GenAI (pre-Sora 2).