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Nvidia has announced DLSS 5, the next evolution of its AI-powered rendering technique, and only gone and called it "the company’s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing."
A video showcasing DLSS 5's effects on games including Resident Evil Requiem, Starfield, Hogwarts Legacy, and EA Sports FC demonstrates the visual impact of the upgraded "real-time neural rendering model." You know those online weirdos who roleplay Instagram filters by paint rolling makeup and baby oil onto normal-looking video game characters in a misguided attempt to make them more conventionally attractive? Yeah, it's worryingly close to that.
The first shot of the video shows Resident Evil Requiem heroine Grace receiving a shotgun blast of Hollywood VFX that turn her into a completely different character and give her movements that unnerving generative AI quality. Our boy Leon, meanwhile, basically just gets a backlight to show off his hair.
Hollywood is actually called out in Nvidia's blog post trumpeting the news – the latest in a long line of examples of games industry companies fruitlessly fetishizing films.
"Bridging the divide between rendering and reality, DLSS 5 empowers game developers to deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects," Nvidia says. "Bridging The Cinematic Gap," a subhead in the post boasts.
Starfield, whose NPCs are generally less detailed than Resident Evil Requiem's at a base, demonstrates an even more dramatic change. Some of these DLSS 5-rendered NPCs look to have come from different games, in that they clash with the rest of Starfield and their oddly shiny skin creases and cracks with telltale AI woodenness. Starfield NPCs were a little stiff, sure, but they were consistently and humanly stiff, dammit.
There's some impressive lighting tech in here, no doubt, but the overall effect is so radical, and seemingly so indifferent to original artistic intent, that the DLSS 5 reveal has stoked some negative and doubtful responses online. Many viewers and commenters across platforms have highlighted similarities to AI photo filters, with one top comment on Nvidia's own YouTube video summing it up: "This looks extremely uncanny."
A YouTube plugin revealing hidden dislikes shows that Nvidia's video currently has 2,000 dislikes to 1,400 likes. And I can already see this reaction sticking to DLSS 5 like feathers on tar: "Slopfilter."
Several game developers, however, have hopped aboard Nvidia's hype train. Bethesda chief Todd Howard writes: "Bethesda has such a rich history pushing graphics with NVIDIA, going all the way back to Morrowind, with that incredible water. When NVIDIA showed us DLSS 5 and we got it running in Starfield, it was amazing how it brought it to life. We've played it. We can't wait for all of you to do so as well."
Capcom executive producer and executive corporate officer Jun Takeuchi says "DLSS 5 represents another important step in pushing visual fidelity forward, helping players become even more immersed in the world of Resident Evil." Curiously, Capcom did not directly comment on the significant changes made to Grace in this demonstration.
Charlie Guillemot of Ubisoft's Vantage Studios says: "The way it renders lighting, materials and characters changes what we can promise to players. On Assassin’s Creed Shadows, it's letting us build the kind of worlds we've always wanted to."
Nvidia says DLSS 5 will arrive this fall, coming to such games as "AION 2, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Black State, CINDER CITY, Delta Force, Hogwarts Legacy, Justice, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, NTE: Neverness to Everness, Phantom Blade Zero, Resident Evil™ Requiem, Sea of Remnants, Starfield, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, Where Winds Meet, and more."
Get ready to yassify some Oblivion NPCs, I guess.
Duncan writes: Nvidia's CEO says "we created the modern video game industry," but all its push into AI upscaling has done is destroy good game optimization.
