DLSS 5 is sparking significant controversy within the gaming industry. While executives from major companies like Capcom and Bethesda appear to be embracing the new generative AI rendering tool, many individual developers have voiced strong criticism, labeling it as “slop” or “disrespectful to the intentional art direction of developers.” This article delves into the reactions of Dave Oshry, co-founder of indie publisher New Blood Interactive, and David Szymanski, the acclaimed developer behind titles such as Dusk, Iron Lung, and Gloomwood, regarding this new technology.
Oshry asserts, “We as developers and players need to push back against this bullshit just like we did with NFTs and crypto games and try in vain to do with predatory micro transactions, loot boxes and battle passes.” The ethical implications of generative AI are already a major talking point among game creators. Concerns range from models potentially scraping existing works without consent to the possibility of mass job displacement. Many fear that executives might prioritize the speed and cost-effectiveness of AI-generated assets over the inherent quality of handcrafted artistic work.
This is fundamentally changing the way video games look
Dave Oshry
It’s important to note that DLSS 5 does not create new assets; rather, it processes existing ones to enhance their photorealism. However, this distinction doesn’t alleviate Oshry’s concerns. He argues, “This is fundamentally changing the way video games look based on artificial intelligence that’s been trained on Instagram models and Epstein memes.” He mockingly adds, “You used to have to spend hours poorly modding your games to make them look this ‘cinematic’, and now Nvidia is going to let you do it for free! Just kidding, it’ll cost like $5,000.” This jab refers to Nvidia’s DLSS 5 demo, which reportedly required two high-end RTX 5090 GPUs for rendering, suggesting a substantial financial barrier for early adopters.
Oshry further questions the value of traditional game art: “At this rate, why make game art at all? Why not just draw some shapes and colours and let AI generate what it thinks it should look like?”
Following his critical comments against DLSS 5 on social media last week, Oshry elaborated on what effective pushback from developers and gamers might entail. “The only thing we can do besides calling them out on it and making them feel bad is voting with our wallets. Cripple their sales, tank their stock price. Stop collaborating with them as developers. Then maybe they’ll think about going back to giving us what we want.”
He clarifies his stance, stating he has “no dog in this fight other than being a PC gamer.” Oshry mentions that New Blood Interactive focuses on retro indie games. Amid Evil is their sole title to integrate DLSS and RTX, an experience he describes as “a huge pain in the ass, arguably made the game look worse, and didn’t get us any extra sales. But it was a fun experiment and Nvidia sent us some free GPUs for our trouble. Yippie.”
The lighting and contrast it adds (or removes, in some parts) makes scenes look less realistic and believable.
David Szymanski
David Szymanski echoes Oshry’s sentiments. He emphasizes that even setting aside the significant concerns regarding artistic intent and the nature of generative AI, the visual alterations introduced by DLSS 5, particularly in lighting and contrast, detract from the realism and believability of game scenes. Szymanski expressed particular disappointment with the technology’s showcase in Resident Evil: Requiem, viewing its application as an “insult and injury combined.”
Szymanski challenges the common argument that DLSS 5 is merely “optional.” He asserts that features like upscaling, temporal anti-aliasing (TAA), and real-time global illumination are effectively becoming standard requirements, as modern AAA games are increasingly designed to rely on these technologies. He believes that while current technologies like DLSS, TAA, and ray tracing may offer performance benefits, they come at the cost of clarity, accessibility, and overall playability, often without solving fundamental problems that couldn’t be addressed by existing methods. “While I’m not a graphics tech expert, I’m still not convinced that they’ve solved many problems that didn’t already have solutions,” he added.
However, not all developers share this critical view. Jean Pierre Kellams, a lead producer at Epic Games, and the director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, have both defended DLSS 5, seeing it as a significant leap in next-generation visuals. Kellams specifically highlights improvements in character rendering, such as better subsurface scattering for skin, more realistic lip creases, and proper light catching on ear studs. The Kingdom Come director stated, “This is just a little uncanny beginning. No way haters will stop this. It’s way more than a soap opera effect every TV has when you turn motion smoothing on.”
Despite some defenses, there’s growing skepticism that DLSS 5 is as sophisticated as initially presented. Jacob Freeman, a GeForce Evangelist, has described it as taking a “2D frame plus motion vectors as input,” which suggests it operates more like an advanced AI filter applied over the game. While its real-time operation is impressive, this technical explanation raises questions about the degree of control and artistic agency developers will have with such tools.
Szymanski believes that gamers are being asked to pay increasingly more for what amount to marginal, “lateral movements in rendering” rather than true innovation. He firmly states that “Nobody wants a fucking glorified autocorrect painting over the work of actual human beings making actual art.”
He articulates his, and he believes most gamers’, desire for games that offer consistent frame rates, good resolution, strong art design, and consistent lighting, all achievable “on hardware that doesn’t require us to remortgage our house, using technology that doesn’t necessitate turning the world into a Mad Max wasteland.”
Nobody wants a fucking glorified autocorrect painting over the work of actual human beings making actual art.
David Szymanski
Crucially, both Oshry and Szymanski emphasize the importance of public criticism against Nvidia. Szymanski notes, “I don’t know if DLSS5 is going to be here to stay or not, but it’s heartening to at least see so many of us in agreement.”
They remain hopeful that collective action can influence major companies like Nvidia: “Hopefully if we’re all loud and insistent enough, and we throw the weight of our wallets around, companies like Nvidia will eventually get the message.”
Alternatively, Szymanski suggests, “That or this will simply be the newest in a long line of features that indie developers don’t have to use, and the indie and AA scenes will continue to provide a wild variety of visual styles that don’t require thousands of dollars in hardware to render.”