DLSS5 looks terrible

So, NVIDIA announced DLSS5 in March, and it quickly drew backlash from gamers and developers. The technology is supposed to basically paint over the existing scenes in a game and add more “realism” to it by adjusting a whole lot of parameters… oh, and it not only sucks in terms of the aesthetics, but it also drains your FPS count.

For a new “technology” that is supposed to revolutionise games, it looks an awful lot like an AI-powered Snapchat filter… because it effectively is that.

Recently, DLSS5 leaked through an early-access build of NBDA 2k27, and then modders took the chance to not only patch the tech into all sorts of different games but to also remove the limitations that prevent the technology from running on older generations of graphics cards. The frame issues are much worse on those, btw, since they don’t have something that DLSS5 relies on, understandably. Look, I’m no techie, and I can’t be arsed to look up the technical terms.

Since then, people have been experimenting by putting the technology to use in various more stylised games, and it looks terrible.

The whole reason why games look the way they do is that there’s an art director pushing a specific vision that works in the context of the game world.

For whatever reason, though, the AI filter that is applied to all of these games is just aging up a lot of characters or making their skin blubber, not to mention that more serious scenes become jarring to sit through, to be absolutely honest.

Again, it just looks like a Snapchat filter. AI bros claim that this looks great because they’re coping. Meanwhile, I’m just wondering who all of this is actually for. I mean, there are some games that aim to look realistic as hell, but even with the most top-level graphics cards, games will never look completely realistic. Even movies suffer from this. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that there is a distinct separate layer to games and reality, visually speaking. More than anything, it’s precisely because of it that we’re able to enjoy media as just media. I’d rather get to experience an artist’s work than some kind of AI slop filter added in post that robs the soul out of a work of art.

This post was originally published on Indiecator.

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