Nvidia’s just-announced DLSS 5 technology has caused a big upset, with a very strong reaction from fans pointing out how different character models look with the AI upscaler enabled.
There’s a lot of distaste for the effect, and it’s a view shared by many game developers — going by our X feed, at least.
We’ve found many examples of studios posting their own memes on the topic, poking fun at the “yassified” faces seen in Nvidia’s announcement video.
Here are some we’ve discovered so far:
It’s fair to say not all developers are onboard, then.
However, to balance things out, the below video includes an interview with Bryan Heemskerk, art director at Massive Damage Inc. It offers a more considered view on the matter:
“I get what Nvidia is trying to do,” Heemskerk says. He explains that modern techniques like ray tracing and path tracing have effectively replaced old school “texture tricks” and things like baked lighting, which gave games a certain look.
“Nvidia’s trying to brute force it by going around the problem, but it’s doing a lot of unintentional consequences, which gives a bit of an ‘eugh’ feeling in the gut,” He says. “I feel unsettled because it’s completely disaligned from artistic intent.”
Heemskerk says Capcom “intended Grace to look a certain way” but points out the distinct changes to her face and hair. “It feels like it’s averaging out the top thousand Instagram portfolios with over 100,000 followers and just becomes the average of that person.”
He says it’ll be important that developers can author the effect. “[FromSoftware] doesn’t even love what they did with the Demon’s Souls remake, in terms of the artistic direction […] We’ve got to be really careful when we are seeing features that are acting like official channels for visuals, but it’s making unintentional changes. I can tell you, going to conferences, if I met some of the artists working on [Requiem] and they see this, they would be very bothered by something like this.”
It’s well worth listening to his full thoughts; the conversation goes into the risk of all games looking “hyper realistic” in place of bespoke art direction for each title, the potential for artists to become “lazy” because they know DLSS 5 is there to “fix” things, and so on.
It’ll be really interesting to see more developers and artists speak about this and provide their perspective. From what we’ve seen so far, the reaction has been pretty unanimously negative, but over time there may be a more balanced view on the tech.
