Nvidia’s DLSS 5 is like motion smoothing for video games, but worse

Yesterday Nvidia revealed its latest upscaling tech called DLSS 5, which it described as “the company’s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018.” Sounds good, until you actually see it. According to Nvidia, the tech “infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials,” but all anyone seemed to notice was that it turned recognizable faces into something resembling AI slop. Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace got a makeover that would make her look at home in a Tilly Norwood video. The Hogwarts Legacy kids looked like they’d been wrung through an Instagram filter. Even Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk, a very real and famous person, had his features warped and became just some other dude with DLSS 5.

Nvidia’s DLSS 5 is like motion smoothing for video games, but worse

The generic, homogenized ‘AI face’ has come for gaming, and it doesn’t look good.

This “significant breakthrough” imbues everything with a particular look that’s become synonymous with AI-generated art. It’s sort of like motion smoothing, if motion smoothing went a step farther and changed people’s faces — and it’s making everything look the same.

It’s important to note that the next time you play Requiem on a PC, Grace won’t suddenly look like she was ripped out of a Grok Imagine demo. DLSS 5 doesn’t launch until the fall, it’ll require some beefy hardware to operate, and it is an optional feature. But it is a technology that is being pushed by one of the most valuable companies in the world, which has support from major video game developers. And they all seem content with associating their games with a very particular aesthetic.

In a statement on Nvidia’s announcement blog, Bethesda boss Todd Howard said that “with DLSS 5 the artistic style and detail shine through without being held back by the traditional limits of real-time rendering,” while noting that the feature will be available in Starfield. Jun Takeuchi, executive producer on many of Capcom’s biggest blockbusters, including Requiem, said that “DLSS 5 represents another important step in pushing visual fidelity forward, helping players become even more immersed in the world of Resident Evil.”

It’s a little strange to hear that some of the most influential names in games have decided that it’s cool for Nvidia to replace their carefully crafted characters with generic AI-powered versions. In a follow-up tweet, Bethesda noted that what we’re seeing is a “very early look,” and that the studio’s “art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game.” So maybe the version of DLSS 5 that’s available in the fall will look very different.

But what we are seeing now points to a bleak future. AI has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our lives, and one of the most frustrating ways has been on an aesthetic level. AI-generated faces are an amalgamation of countless images, which are then used to spit out a sort of homogenized ideal. It’s typically easy to identify thanks to a handful of telltale signs: unnaturally smooth skin and uniform features, perpetually cheerful eyes, a smiling mouth with full lips, perfectly styled hair that looks synthetic, small noses, and HDR-style lighting that highlights every contour. On their own, these can be typical facial features, but when every AI face has them all or most of them, we start veering into the Uncanny Valley.

That’s why so many people reacted strongly to the faces in Nvidia’s announcement: They don’t just look bad, they look the same as everything else. That same aesthetic is prevalent everywhere from Instagram feeds to YouTube thumbnails, and it’s been inching its way from social networks to more traditional forms of entertainment and culture. I’ve yet to see a good AI-generated film, and yet they keep coming, and you can identify them from a single screen. Nvidia’s new tech is the most visible example of that aesthetic infiltrating games.

There are a number of reasons why seeing AI mangle an artist’s work is troublesome for games in particular. The industry has been ravaged by layoffs and studio closures following some very expensive misplaced bets and a post-pandemic slowdown, so the potential for replacing human work with slop doesn’t sit well. It’s also a medium where a subset of the audience has some very backward ideas about what a normal human woman looks like, so making existing characters somehow both more generic and more cartoonish through an AI tool is extremely problematic.

Since the announcement, there have been a number of indie developers who have come out to lambast DLSS 5 through memes and more explicitly negative statements. And while a large percentage of developers seem to be against the idea of using generative AI in their games, with some smaller studios going so far as to use “AI free” as a marketing label, it’s also true that many of those in decision-making positions at larger developers don’t feel the same way. That’s why we have the likes of Howard and Takeuchi espousing this technology while at the same time showing a demo that people can’t stop making fun of.

Grace’s face rendered through DLSS 5 is an early vision of what things could look like if the adoption becomes more widespread. And if that happens, being a good friend might mean turning it off when you visit, just like motion smoothing.