Game devs say Nvidia’s DLSS 5 reveal blindsided them

Nvidia DLSS 5 is coming later this year, adding generative “AI” features to the performance-enhancing tech. Gamers are calling the tool an “Instagram yaas filter” and “AI slop,” among other, less kind terms. The way that it adds detail to faces and seems to hijack — or replace? — the game’s natural lighting was so striking that Nvidia’s CEO had to issue a rare response to the blowback.

But in its brief demonstrations, Nvidia has positioned this as a developer tool to enhance visuals, something that’s optional and within the artistic control of game creators. So what did the game creators themselves say before the GTC demo? Not much, it would seem, since at least some of them had no idea Nvidia would be using their game visuals to show off the technology.

“We found out at the same time as the public,” said an Ubisoft developer, speaking to Insider Gaming. Developers at Capcom expressed similar shock. Capcom’s Resident Evil: Requiem was the showpiece example in Nvidia’s one-minute demo reel, and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows was mentioned as a launch title for when DLSS 5 is set to arrive in fall 2026.

It should be pointed out that DLSS 5 is in its very early stages at the moment. It was barely a blip in Jensen Huang’s GTC presentation, which was mostly about the company’s more industrial “AI” hardware.

Since we’re months and months away from actual implementation, it’s safe to assume that most of the people working on the mentioned games were not aware of the announcement beforehand, and those who were told were presumably sworn to silence by embargoes and non-disclosure agreements. Insider Gaming also doesn’t mention specific names, so we don’t know if they were talking to high-level producers or the most junior employees.

The crew on PCWorld’s The Full Nerd podcast discussed the announcement at length on Tuesday, just one day after the reveal:

The fallout from the DLSS 5 announcement is hard to ignore. Gamers, already primed to be wary of Nvidia after half a year of skyrocketing hardware prices due to the “AI” bubble, and inundated with generative “AI” content from every angle (including new game releases big and small), aren’t feeling particularly well-disposed. And that’s just the preamble.

The actual implementation of DLSS 5, which appears to be more of a frame-by-frame AI filter than a performance upgrade like super-sampling or frame generation, has artistic and aesthetic issues as well. PCWorld’s Mark Hachman calls it “simply the sprinkling of AI content on top of games, devaluing them in the process.”

And, unlike previous DLSS implementations, it seems the additive features of DLSS 5 come with a resource cost rather than a boost. Nvidia’s GTC demonstrations had the games running on two top-of-the-line RTX 5090 GPUs, a setup we haven’t seen since the glory days of SLI. One card was running the game, another was applying the generative tech on top of it. Nvidia says it will run off a single GPU when it’s ready to hit end user PCs.

But the message seems clear that this will require a lot of extra power… at time when PC hardware has never been more expensive and scarce. A situation that’s largely to the benefit, and to some degree the creation, of Nvidia itself.