Nvidia has revealed the latest iteration of its Deep Learning Super Sampling technology, and the reception has been mixed, to say the least. DLSS5 was unveiled in a deep dive video from the gents at Digital Foundry, embedded at the bottom of this article. Rich and Oliver from Digital Foundry seemed impressed by the results, but the comments section of the video is another story entirely.
As of this writing, the YouTube video from Digital Foundry has over 16,000 comments, and a great many of them are negative. The demonstration features games like “Resident Evil Requiem,” “Starfield,” and “Oblivion Remastered,” cutting back and forth between the game with and without DLSS5. While the Digital Foundry fellas praise the implementation of DLSS5’s per-pixel AI “enhancement,” others are less than enthused.
Reactions in the comments run the gamut. @ClowdyHowdy says, “it has that perfect AI slop sheen over the top of every frame,” and that’s one of the more diplomatic responses, alongside @nakamura-8421’s observation: “I love how the actual light sources and shadows disappear, and everyone gets transported to the same AI ‘studio photoshoot.‘” In a sassy response, @Gagurum wrote, “thank god now all my games can look like instagram ai ads,” and @twin_shine decried the new technology as “Deep Learning Super Slop 5.” @lukas0999 wrote, “I thought this video was an April Fool’s joke, but it’s still March,” while @dreamsofgrandeur didn’t mince words with their response, “Incredible. They’ve built an automatic enshi*tifier.”
What’s everybody so worked up about? Let’s take a look at some of the comparisons. The first major one is of Grace Ashcroft, the protagonist of Resident Evil Requiem. The DLSS5 version looks like someone applied an AI Instagram filter over the image. Her lips are redder and look filled in, her cheeks and eyes are completely modified, and the lighting just looks unnatural overall. Most bizarre of all, her eyebrows look painted in, a bizarre artistic change that reeks of “yassification.” All of these changes combine to undermine the original art direction of “Resident Evil Requiem” and make it into something that’s gaudy, ghoulish, and gross.
Another game they look at is “Oblivion Remastered,” with particular focus on the character of Heinrich Oaken-Hull and his iconic cheekbones. With DLSS5 disabled, Heinrich is lit naturally, with his eyes covered by the shadow of his brow. With DLSS5 on, however, his face is blown out by unnatural illumination, like he’s wearing an invisible Ring light, to the point where his eyes are now visible. However, since his eyes were hidden by shadow in the original image, I can infer that his eyes in DLSS5 are entirely AI-generated. This theory gets reinforced when he blinks, which looks unnatural and downright horrifying, since his eyes are somehow still visible through his closed eyelids, like he’s some kind of alien jellyfish monster disguised as a man.
A third example, “Assassin’s Creed Shadows” showcases another huge issue with DLSS5. Without DLSS5, the Japanese forest looks lush and realistic. With it, the forest looks unnaturally bright, with presumably AI-generated details replacing the shadowed parts of the forest. The lighting of the original game is completely discarded in favor of the whims of an interloping AI. All of the examples have lighting that is completely at odds with what the game was originally designed to look like.
All told, the debut of DLSS5 was a huge miss, and Nvidia has spent the day as the internet’s laughing stock. DLSS5 is scheduled to launch later this year, and there’s a lot of time to improve it, to scale back the AI ambition and focus more on what players actually want from a tool like this. Back in the old days, technologies like DLSS and frame generation were said to be using “machine learning” to achieve their results. Over time, however, the catch-all term, “AI,” slowly took over. One could suppose that “machine learning” and “AI” are the same thing, that there’s a distinction without a difference between the two. However, I’d say we found the line today. This is not what players had in mind for the next generation of DLSS. Previous versions of DLSS were upscalers designed to make lower-resolution images sparkle on 4K displays. On the contrary, the DLSS5 we’ve seen so far only succeeds in compromising the visual integrity of video games by making them look like AI slop.