Senior animator Mike York has worked on a range of hits from the divorced man's GTA 5 to the divorced man's Death Stranding 2, so he's seen a lot of things in video games, but never Grace Ashcroft after having undergone liposuction. That's the kind of image Nvidia's new AI-powered DLSS 5 rendering model brings to Resident Evil Requiem, one of the titles in which it will debut in the fall, and York can't stand it.
He offers his perspective as an industry veteran in a new stream on his YouTube channel, York Street Gaming. He reacts to games tech site Digital Foundry going hands-on with DLSS 5 in a March 16 video and has a very different gut reaction than the publication – though Digital Foundry has since expressed regret for the way it first enthused about DLSS 5.
With his brow furrowed deeper than the ocean floor, York attempts to analyze the now infamous image of Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace looking sandblasted. He says, "Whoa, hold on," after DLSS 5 takes away Grace's normal video game character face and replaces it with a TikTok filter.
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no," York decides. "No. This isn't just some lighting, dude. What the f–... I'm telling you, this is like a complete AI re-render." Indeed, Nvidia explains in its DLSS 5 announcement post that it "introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials" – what CEO Jensen Huang admits in more explicit terms is "the GPT moment for graphics."
"Who even is that? That's a different girl," York exclaims. "You know why I can tell [...] – look, her eyes are no longer looking, like, correctly. That one eye is looking over here, and one eye is looking there." The power of technology.
