There's upscaling, and then there's straight-up changing a game's art direction, and your gaming hardware should only do one of those things

One of my favorite games of all time is Dishonored. Ignoring its amazing sandbox gameplay, exceptional level design, and barrels of charm that make it a joy to play more than 10 years after its release, its art style is one of the things that make it feel truly unique. With the announcement from GTC that DLSS 5 is going to be coming to some of the best graphics cards this fall, I'm very afraid of what it means for games like Dishonored.

DLSS 5 is being met with criticism at every turn so far. It looks like it's going five steps beyond the upscaling we've seen from gaming PC hardware until now, and not in a good way. In fact, it looks like an undeniable generative AI do-over that fundamentally changes the way in-game characters look.

Until now, AI upscaling has been about providing gamers with higher frame rates, but while making games smoother is one thing, trying to make them look "better" is something new entirely. If anything, toggling DLSS on makes your games look worse, but that's the price we've all accepted to unlock better frame rates in an era where game optimization isn't exactly at its peak.

Announcing NVIDIA DLSS 5 | AI-Powered Breakthrough in Visual Fidelity for Games - YouTube

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Nvidia's been quick to try and get out ahead of my biggest concern with DLSS 5 - the destruction of art direction:

"Important to note with this technology advance - game developers have full, detailed artistic control over DLSS 5's effects to ensure they maintain their game's unique aesthetic," Nvidia commented on its own YouTube reveal trailer.

"The SDK includes things like intensity, color grading and masking off places where the effect shouldn't be applied. It's not a filter - DLSS 5 inputs the game’s color and motion vectors for each frame into the model, anchoring the output in the source 3D content."

But to be honest, I'm left asking why they'd want to implement any of the changes shown in this trailer. I don't know about you, but there hasn't been a moment in the last decade of gaming when I've thought, "Man, I wish all my video games looked more photorealistic."

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Art direction is, in my opinion, the way the soul of a game comes across. Like its sound design and distinct-feeling gameplay, it's what really makes a game feel unique. I love observing the subtleties between the character models in The Last of Us compared to Marvel's Spider-Man. Both have completely different approaches to character animation, but both are capable of telling an excellent story with their chosen direction. You can look at franchises that have been around for ages. Resident Evil, Mario, Zelda, and even Grand Theft Auto - they've all found ways of modernizing their art styles without losing the soul of how their games looked back in the day.

With the explosion of the indie game scene, I've loved that we celebrate any and all art styles today. "Game of the Year" isn't automatically the one with the most "realistic" graphics; that award can go to anything because it's about more than just crafting a lifelike look.

And I think trying to apply a blanket statement to all of these art styles by saying DLSS can now make them look "better" doesn't work. All of those unique bits of visual identity, the way faces look, the way lighting is directed at certain points of the environment, and the way the aesthetics come together have all been put there for a reason. They are, for want of a less blatant term, artistic choices. Even if game developers have control over how it's implemented, DLSS 5 seems to disrupt a lot of that direction.

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DLSS 5 seems to be pushing for all games to look photorealistic. Starfield, Resident Evil Requiem, EA Sports UFC, all the games shown in the trailer end up looking exactly the same, their subtle artstyle differences removed in the name of... something?

Ignoring completely that it looks like AI-generated slop, all of the hard work of character and environment artists, all the technical feats of animating facial meshes, all of the detail brought over from motion capture - with DLSS 5, it all fades into the background as Nvidia's new form of upscaling takes over.

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There's been so much controversy around any and all use of generative AI in game development lately, but with DLSS support being such a widespread tool in so many games today, I do worry about how this is all going to be implemented. Nvidia says that game devs will have full, detailed artistic control over it, but to what extent? Is DLSS 5 a special opt-in, or will allowing support for DLSS 4.5 for performance boost reasons also mean they have to submit to DLSS 5's visual substitutes?

For the record, this sort of question mark is why I've been wishing that there was less of an emphasis on AI upscaling within modern graphics cards. In my eyes, hardware shouldn't be so reliant on software to make it work to its full capabilities. DLSS isn't something you own and therefore control when you purchase a bit of hardware, so how much do you really own and control your graphics card if it's reliant on upscaling that can change after the purchase has been made? If DLSS 5 causes enough controversy, will game devs stop using it? Will support for it within games then become less widespread? If so, your RTX 50 Series GPU might not be the future-proofed purchase we thought it was.

I'm getting a bit carried away with a potential future, but it's because I'm not sure I like the direction Nvidia is going in right now. It was only a few weeks ago that the brand's CEO said his company "created the modern video game industry". With DLSS 5, I hate to contradict Nvidia's comment on its own video, but it looks like it now wants to recreate it in its own image.

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