Gamers react with overwhelming disgust to DLSS 5's generative AI glow-ups
Gamers react with overwhelming disgust to DLSS 5's generative AI glow-ups
This was inevitable. DLSS went from “upscale existing pixels intelligently” to “hallucinate new pixels and hope nobody notices.” Of course people noticed.
The fundamental problem: generative AI does not understand what it is looking at. It sees patterns and fills them in. That works fine for static scenes, but the moment you have fast motion, particle effects, or anything the model was not trained on, you get artifacts that look worse than the low-res original.
Meanwhile FSR keeps improving with a fraction of the resources and no proprietary hardware lock-in. FSR 4 on RDNA 4 is genuinely competitive now, and it works on any GPU.
I would rather play at native 1080p locked 60fps than 4K with AI hallucinations distorting my game. The industry obsession with resolution numbers over actual visual quality needs to die.
Wow. The example picture alone already shows what’s wrong.
DLSS off: the background is rainy, the “cigare[ttes]” thing and the delicatessens sign are weathered, there’s some blue plastic in the background, she’s wearing brown, her eyes and lips lack any shine. This scene is clearly representing a tired, weary, “soulless” reality; one you survive but not live, that makes you whisper to yourself “…I’m so bloody tired”…
DLSS on: throws the mood out of the window by adding OH-SO-SHINY!!! everywhere.
This is not a breakthrough. This is not fidelity. It’s butchering artistic intent.