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There's no getting around it: AI is dominating the worldwide technological conversation in just about every industry. People must adapt to the rapidly evolving AI landscape, which has been polarizing on many fronts, to say the least.
The gaming industry has walked hand-in-hand with AI technologies for quite a while now. AI has provided crucial graphical and performance improvements to video games through the use of upscaling technology, with NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR leading the way. It's natural that the swift revolution of AI tech as a whole would see these gaming tools affected, hopefully in a positive way. But NVIDIA may have taken things a step or two too far.
DLSS 5 brings "photorealism" to video games
This week, NVIDIA rolled out a demo presentation of DLSS 5 in action. Considered by the company itself as "the company's most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018", the updated version of the upscaling technology is supposed to bring photorealism to video games.
Set to be released fully this fall, DLSS 5 "introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials". The results speak for themselves, but it's abundantly clear that this is not what gamers truly want.
Gamers feel that DLSS 5 is just an "AI slop filter" and doesn't have a place in video games
There has been massive backlash to the announcement and reveal of the technology. The general sentiment is that DLSS 5 is essentially putting an "AI slop filter" over video game character models. By making everything photorealistic, the art direction and style intended by game designers would become moot.
- "Like what's the point? Artists spend hours perfecting a model for you to come and replace it with AI Faces? I seriously hate this so much."
- "This is the AI slop people have been wanting to stay out of video games, but people are giving this a free pass (even if it looks horrible) because it has the Nvidia DLSS branding on it."
- "Listen, I like DLSS. It's a marvel of modern computing. But this? This will make every game look like a crappy AI face filter was applied. It undermines all of the creative efforts of studios that work so hard designing characters and art. Actual abomination."
Gaming journalist Luke Stephens, in a critique of the technology on YouTube, also pointed out that the character models were motion captured with a specific design in mind. The DLSS 5 filter doesn't sync up perfectly with the previous models, so facial mannerisms during dialogue look particularly wonky.
NVIDIA will surely improve this technology over time, and it does have benefits like better lighting and shadows overall. But as a whole, this is currently a PR nightmare for the company.