The Internet Killed DLSS 5..

Ajouté : 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Windows 10 is end of life. That means you really want to have Windows 11 nowadays. You can buy a retail key for me for $12.50 only. So, click in the link in video description if you would like to purchase a key for yourself and then you're up and running again for 2026.

[00:00:18]5 years ago, this video broke the internet. Interlapse took GTA 5, a game from 2013, fed it through a neural network, and made it look like a dash cam in real life. So, the comment section was the same prayer for 2 years straight. Imagine if this ever came to a real game. Imagine playing this. Why can't Rockstar just ship this? Well, last March, Nvidia stood on stage at GTC and basically said, "Okay, here you go."

[00:00:47]So they called it DLSS5 neural rendering, the biggest leap in real-time graphics since Wraith Racing in 2018, at least according to Jansen himself. So according to him, this was the dream we'd been begging for, basically delivered by Nvidia. So you'd expect the gaming internet to lose its mind in a good way, right? Yeah. Instead of that, it became one of the most disliked tech reveals in GPU history. 84% down votes on the official video. We had even that threat sent to Digital Foundry and even a studio CEO publicly calling for an Nvidia boycott. So, according to Nvidia, the dream did arrive, but it unfortunately set the world so divided and set it fully on fire when it came to arguments. So, let's talk about why and whether that hate actually is justified about this technique of DLSS5.

[00:01:43]Before we get into the controversy that we all know today, we need to get one thing straight because half of the angry comments online are from people who genuinely don't know what DLSS5 actually does. And I'll be honest, Nvidia didn't really help by giving it the same name as the upscaler we have been using for years. So, we had DLSS1 through version 4 and now we also have 4.5. And that is pretty much upscaling and also frame generation. So it means if you're playing at 1440p or 4K, it will render it uh natively at 1080p and AI somewhat upskills and guesses what the 1440p or 4K 4K looks like. So it will render every other frame and AI invents the ones in between like really guessing about the frames. So that's what they also sometimes call fake frames.

[00:02:37]However, in uh the actual way, it definitely makes your frame rate a lot better and it makes your GPU run faster.

[00:02:44]However, DLSS5 is not that DLSS 5 is something completely different living under the same brand name of DLSS. So, here is what it actually does in comparison with the other DLSS. So, DLSS5 uh it will mean that the game engine still renders the frame normally. So the same geometries, same textures, same character models, nothing really changes there. But then DSS5 takes that finished frame plus the motion vectors and runs it through a neural network trained to understand what materials look like in the real world. So skin, hair, metal, fabric, foyage, all that kind of stuff.

[00:03:22]And it reshapes the lighting and material response frame by frame. So your character's face polygons, it is untouched. the texture on the jacket untouched. But the way light bounces off the skin, the subsurface scattering, the way the hair changes, catches the sun, that gets a neural pass. So, three things matter here, and I want you to remember them because they come back at the end of this video. One, it has to be built into the game. A developer has to integrate DLSS 5 using Nvidia Streamline SDK or the Unreal Engine plugin. So that means you cannot just simply force it onto a game that does not support it. It is no if it doesn't mean uh if it has no integration, it just simply doesn't have DLSS 5. Then two out of three, you have to turn it on just like rateracing. So it's a toggle in the graphics menu at that time if it's going to be released.

[00:04:16]So if you hate it, just leave it off.

[00:04:18]The game still runs exactly as the developers shipped it that way. And then three out of three developers have controls. So they have an intensity slider. They have color grading and they have masking. They can tell DLSS 5, apply your magic or whatever you want to call it to the environment, but leave the characters alone. That's not that's a great example, I would think. Or vice versa. And Nvidia calls this controllability. So, hold these th uh three points in your head because they're going to come back.

[00:04:53]Okay. So, with all that in mind, why is everyone still furious? The short answer is Nvidia's official demo. They picked the worst possible way to show this off.

[00:05:04]So, for the ones who play this game, this is Grace from Resident Evil Recreum. On the left, her original character model. On the right, the LSS5 on. And look, there's not really a nice way to say this, but the right side looks like she went through some kind of popular AI Instagram filter. You know, you have the smoother skin, brighter eyes, the freckles softened, and the character that Capcom originally designed to look weary and worn down suddenly looks like she's about to film a Tik Tok video. So, this single screenshot became the face of all the controversy. Then we have Carla Ortis.

[00:05:41]Yeah, that's how I should pronounce her name, which is an artist who worked for Ubisoft, Blizzard, and Marvel. called it disrespectful to the intentional art direction of developers and a Phil Better Games narrative director called it the Scarlett Johansification of video games. Angry Joe, who is also a very popular YouTube set uh turned DLSS into a Tik Tok filter. So, the numbers tell the story. 1.7 million views, 16,000 likes, and one sarcastic comment that got 23,000 up votes. So, more likes on the joke than on the actual video. The EA Sports FC demo set at 14.5% positive likes, dislikes. But then it got more serious because Dave Asher, which is the CEO of New Blood, New Blood Interactive, uh, the Dusk and Ultrakill people went on record calling for boycotting Nvidia. So, a direct quote from them is [ __ ] their sales, tank their stock price, stop collaborating with them as developers. Then also one of the biggest controversies I think was Digital Foundry because Digital Foundry is absolutely the most respected or at least one of the most respected technical analysis uh YouTube channels in PC gaming posted a hands-on saying the tech was astonishing, amazing, etc. And it got that threats. That's how angry people were. So they had to put out a follow-up video literally titled why we should have waited with our coverage. So that's not normal for that kind of things. That's not really a tech reveal going badly. That's really really an angry mob which is somewhat started some uh divided war between Yeah. you know the the the the controversy we've seen today with the LSS5.

[00:07:33]And this chapter is going to be probably a pretty sensitive chapter because I want to push back a little a huge amount of the hate. Is it really about the LSS5? It's because the word AI is being attached to literally anything in uh to yeah, literally anything in 2026 actually. So, the famous phrase AI slop, it has a real meaning because it was meant for loweffort generated AI content. We had those six-fingered people all over Facebook, you know, uh where people tried to deceive people that it was an actual picture. We had AI children's video with I don't know melting horses and YouTube kits stuff that obviously looked AI. We have all these generated books on Amazon being sold. So these are real identifiable garbage flooding the internet. But somewhere in the last year, AI slop stopped describing a quality and started describing a category. Anything with AI, I don't know, even if people just use it for for a boring work replacement, if AI touched it, it was automatically slop.

[00:08:36]Even games like um in example Balls Gate 3 when it was somewhat leaked that the developers used some boring work uh sorry, used AI to kill some boring work.

[00:08:46]It was all of a sudden very controversial, automatically slop. So, it didn't matter how it looked or how it was created anymore. If the term AI touched it, it was slop. So, an example, Fast Company did put it bluntly, and I think they're right. They said the word slop, AI slop in 2026 is just a new version of it's photoshopped that we used to say 20 years ago when it was a cool picture, but we didn't either want to believe it or didn't want to give it credit. We just said it's being photoshopped or for from the from the zeros like, "Hey, it's just CGI." If it was a cool movie sim, but obviously fake or a little bit debatable, we would say it's CGI. So, this was a way to dismiss something without actually engaging with the actual content. But look, I really get the anxiety because AI has been used to do genuinely shitty things in gaming because Call of Duty Black Ops 6 had, example, AI generated loading screens and 20% of Steam games shipped in 2025 had an AI disclosure. So, one out of five games on Steam had an AI disclosure. The Washington Post ran a piece about gamers literally forcing studios to cancel titles over AI suspicion. So, yeah, there's a real legitimate fear about creative labor being replaced. But the thing is, DLSS5 doesn't replace artists. It just runs on top of what has been created. It just runs on top of the game itself. The full geometry and game is still there of the developers, textures, character designs, animations. It's just GLSS5 only touches the final lighting pass and that's it.

[00:10:23]So, the developer has to opt in. The player has to turn it on as well. And the artists have even masking controls what they want to have uh yeah touched by DLSS 5. So, an example compared to all the Skyrim mod list we've seen today. Uh some random wobblejack downloads. I don't know, 2,000 3,000 mods and an example changes all the NPCs from Skyrim into Barbie dolls.

[00:10:46]Completely lore unfriendly stuff. So yeah, that literally replaces the artist character work with zero developer involvement and zero artist control. So we have been doing that to Bethesda games and pretty much all games modded for 20, 30 years. So there has never been outrage of that. So I'm not saying you can be critical of the LSS5. You definitely can, but I'm saying be critical of the actual thing what it does and not just the vibes that the internet gives you.

[00:11:17]Now, I want to be fair because, you know, even while I'm somewhat sounding like I'm defending Nvidia, um there are real legitimate concerns here and yeah, I just don't want to be that guy who defends Nvidia against the entire angry mob. Uh concern one, the demos Nvidia picked were actively misleading. So they ran DLSS5 on games like Oblivion Remastered, Assassin's Creed Shadows without telling those developers. So PC Gamer reported Capcom and Ubisoft developers found out at the same time pretty much as the public knew. We saw at GTC was DLSS 5 with zero artist input. They had no masking, no intensity tuning, no color grading. So, the worst possible version you could have. When games actually ship with proper integration, it should look way different. But Nvidia showed us the unsupervised version and called it the future. Then we have concern two. Color grading gets overwritten. So, in the Oblivion comparisons, the warm, golden, I don't know, deliberately contrasty look of the original Oblivion remaster gets flattened into cooler, more realistic uh if you want to call it realistic lighting. So, the art direction was pretty much intentional and I think Siridil isn't really meant to look like a photo, like photo realistic. I think it's still more of a fantasy game, very lush, you know, in the world of Siridil uh for Oblivion and DLSS 5 tries to average towards photo realism and while it looks cool, you just lose something of the game. Then we have concern number three. Nobody has answered what the DLSS 5 model was trained on. So game artists Koutaku and New Blood have all asked and we just don't know and given everything that happened with AI training and copyright right now that's not really a small question. Then we have concern four um game preservation. So, a museum curator raised this and it's the smartest critique I've seen so far because if generation of games depends on an AI model running on a Nvidia hardware, then what happens in 20 years when that model isn't supported anymore? So then you have, I would say, a question of which version of the game is the real one, so the one the developer shipped or the one millions of players actually played with DLSS5 on. And then we also have concern number five, the soft pressure. Because right now the LSS5 is opt in, it requires a huge amount of hardware power as well. But if it becomes the default way to look nextG and oh developers definitely might start cutting corners uh because we know that from developers.

[00:13:57]So they don't care about traditional lighting anymore because an example DLSS 5 will fix it. And we have already seen this with DLSS upscaling from an example DLSS 4.5. So, some PC ports now are unplayable without it. Even uh if you want to play fully native, you just can't because developers, they don't really care anymore about optimizing the game. And I've seen that even with my RTX 5090 on 4K, some games without the LSS still can't have freaking 120 FPS.

[00:14:29]So, that's insane for a GPU of almost €2500 plus. that running it native is just not possible. So, sure, the controversy isn't all noise. There's definitely legitimate critic here, and it's just I'm unfortunately buried under the 50,000 AI slop comments.

[00:14:54]All right, let's get personal for me for a second because this is where it hits different for me versus everyone else on the internet. I've been making Skyrim tutorials, mod list, and graphics guides for 15 years. I actually did start in the '9s with Unreal when it came out and the first Unreal editor where you could pretty much mod and edit everything. Um, so yeah, that's quite a long time. For I would say 30 years almost, I've been modding video games. That's longer than some of you have been gaming at all. And in that time, I've watched this community pure uh pour an absolutely insane amount of collective effort into one single goal, making games look the way they're supposed to look. If, in an example, Skyrim uh from Bethesda had better hardware in then in 2011. So, an example for Skyrim Skyrim Special Edition, we now have Wubblejack mod list like Novis V6 or NGVO or pretty much there's so many wobble jacks to make things a lot easier. You're not installing every mod one by one anymore.

[00:15:54]But in this case, easier is relative because you're still downloading hundreds of gigabytes. You're still managing over, I don't know, sometimes over 3,000 4,000 individual mods. And even then, things break, patches will conflict, MCM menus explode, Skyrim script extender stuff doesn't work, etc., etc., after a patch, an example.

[00:16:15]So, you spend uh days sometimes troubleshooting even with AI tools if you're unlucky before you can actually launch the game. And here's the thing I think about every time someone dunks on DLSS 5 for altering its artist intent.

[00:16:29]So, what do you think those 3,000 4,000 mods are doing? So, a Wubic List completely replace Skyrim's characters, lighting, weather, textures, animation, sounds, literally everything. So the Bethesda artists who shipped the original game back in 2011, they have zero input into yeah what something like novice looks, what MGVO looks, what any mod list looks, zero. So no masking controls, no intensity sliders, no color grading options. A modder just replaces their work with literally everything.

[00:17:01]And we've been celebrating that for 20, 30 years, including myself. So when someone tells me DLSS5 is disrespecting the developer intent with its opt-in toggle, its developer controlled masking, its artist faced uh facing intensity tools. I you know I'm a little bit uh skeptical about that because we've been doing something far more aggressive to Skyrim and many other moddable games since 2030 years and calling it a love letter to the game. So I have to say here is what actually excites me about the LSS5. if this technology does what it promises on older games and what I saw in the Digital Foundry hands-on suggest it really might even if you know that video was a little bit controversial. I can look through those kinds of things nowadays. I'm 40 years old so yeah I don't really care much about the public's opinion. I have to say the graphics modding Arms race is basically over the modding which you really have to do for all the games can be done a lot easier at least graphically. You don't need a lot of EMBs, a lot of presets, a lot of that kind of stuff fighting each other over. You don't need a 4K texture pack or 4K MPC overall. You don't need to choose between performance looking good all kind of modless because the neuro renderers can handle the heavy lifting and that is really freeing because now all that modding energy so the community of incredibly talented people who have been spending 15 20 years rebuilding an example Skyrim's visuals from the ground up they can redirect it so into gameplay overalls an example into quests into new lands better combat so fixing the things that actually need human creativity to solve the stuff that DLSS5 can't touch. So in my world, DLSS5 would never kill Skyrim modding because because it just would promote it. The graphics department finally gets an automation if you have some customization in it. So the people can go work on stuff that actually needs them like the 10 thousands of bugs and gameplay adjustments that a game like Skyrim needs.

[00:19:12]So, where does this leave us? Well, first of all, I hope I didn't piss off a lot of people with my uh yeah, I would say nuanced opinion, especially if you're one of the few or one of you, one of the many who is under bandwaging of just hating it because of the internet tells you to do. So, Nvidia has already started backpedaling on its own messaging as well. So, Jensen initially called all the critics completely wrong, which I think is classic Jensen. But a week later on the Lex Fritman podcast, the tone completely changed. He somewhat said that he didn't really love AI slop and that thesis 5 was just way different than uh AI slop. So yeah. Um also companies in example like Bethesda put up their own statement. They will say this will be under the artist control and totally optional for players. So you know that's nice. Todd Howard actually said it's amazing. So, not every studio is on the same page regarding DLSS5. So, where are we now? Well, DLSS5 will ship in fall 2026 and the first games to launch with proper integration, so not the unsupervised demo versions that Nvidia uh did theelves, will be the real tests. So, when developers actually use the masking as intended, use the intensity controls and the color grading the way Nvidia built them, we will see if DLSS5 looks like a thoughtful tool or a Tik Tok filter like everyone claims.

[00:20:36]So, what is my honest prediction? Well, I think it's going to go the same way the LSS1 did, but hopefully a little bit better. So what I mean with that is do you remember how everyone hated the LSS1 which of which was very very uh yeah real because it looked blurry, it looked smeared, it looked awful. But two years later and then a few years later there we had DLSS 2 and 3 and it was so good that DLSS on now became uh I would say the default recommendation on PC for Nvidia cards. So the technology just changes and improve and an example I think we're going to have um DLSS 5.2 2 or 5.5 or something, it will just be better and better and better tech. But I think the biggest difference between DLSS 5 and 4 is that DLSS4 actually does something to frame rate to rendering, you know, and I think MFG, so multiframe generation is a little bit debatable.

[00:21:30]But I think DLSS 4 is a great technique.

[00:21:33]But I think DLSS 5 eventually will improve as well. But the most important thing is you need to have the option to choose whether you want to have it on or not. I'm have to say the biggest question of this entire topic uh the one I'm more honestly interested in. I think it's something uh yeah um that is not about the LSS5 at all. It's about whether we can have a real conversation about a new technology or whether every AI adjacent thing which is just on the rise nowadays in 2026 triggers the same reaction of yeah regardless of whether it is actually slop or just looks impressive.

[00:22:17]Just 5 years ago we were begging for this. Let's go back to where we start with this video. 5 years ago, every comment on this Intel video was, "Please, someone make this real." And 5 years later, a real version of it arrives. And the response now is, "This is pure AI slop." So, sure, maybe the tech isn't perfect yet. The launch demos definitely were not from Nvidia. But I have to say somewhere between in this is the future and this is destroying art is the actual truth that the LSS5 is just a tool. and tools get used well or badly depending on who's holding them right or wrong. So, some implementations sure will be ugly, will be AI slop looking AI filters, but some will definitely look better, will be revelations, especially in my opinion with older games, it's going to be or at least the the potential is amazing. But yeah, that's me. Who am I? Nobody cares. I'm really wondering about your opinion. Are you do you still stick with your original opinion that you still find the LSS5 a slop? Or maybe I hopefully informed you a little bit better what the technique actually is. Let me know that in the comments. I'm really looking forward and thank you for watching my video.