First optional but gets pushed more and more until it's mandatory.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Nvidia has no history of forcing it on us. It's always an option. They have a lot of options today
I don't like AI, but setting that aside, isn't DLSS just frame generation to improve performance of games on weaker hardware? So if the AI bubble is buying up all your DDR5 and your DDR4 isn't fast enough for the frame rate and resolution you want, isn't DLSS a good thing? Like yes it's using AI to figure out what goes in between the frames, but it's basing that off of human created frames around it. Kind of like how those 60FPS 4K anime intros on YouTube work. Except a lot of people don't like them either... but when it comes to gaming, people who want 60FPS or higher can leave the setting on, and people who don't want it can suffer at 20-30FPS if that's what they want.
I do realise that what people really want is affordable computer parts, but that's not happening any time soon, and it won't happen soon enough for the next generations of Xbox and PlayStation. While the current generations were marred by availability at launch due to scalpers, I feel the next generation will be marred by its compromises in the name of AI. And, while this is a PC gaming comm, the consoles do drive the industry, and PC gamers get what's left. Fortunately — especially with Betheslop games — you can often mod some of the more egregious shit out.
That's what the tech was touted as over a decade ago when this started with both DLSS and FSR. Give an extension of life to your older cards.
Currently that's not what it used for, it's now a tool that allows developers to not give a crap about optimizing the game or creating textures and models that look good out of the box. Now it's THE tool that will get you up to 60 fps with a GPU that has a ton of expensive RAM because developers don't have to care just let AI make it's guess, better have money because screw your low end gaming, it's THE tool to ensure that native rendering and models don't have to be good, just slap on what you want it to look like and let AI do the rest, artists intention be damned.
With it running on two 5090's, and yeah, yeah, they said it'll run on on card and we all should believe corporations, it looks like their little way of starting to make owning a gaming computer too expensive for anyone and why don't you just subscribe to our cloud gaming instead where you can rent out the capability we decide to give you. Call me cynical but that's what I'm seeing here.
I just don't give a shit about graphics anymore. I run almost anything at very high details on an rtx2700 super, which I bought off eBay right before covid hit. I don't need graphics that require more hardware. If DLSS is just compensating for shitty vibe code and the base game runs like shit, I'm not going to play it. Got plenty of games in my backlog anyway.
Except DLSS 5 isn't just upscaling. It's replacing the image.
And to achieve what it does, they used one 5090 to render the game normally, and an entire second 5090 just to run DLSS 5.
How is that an improvement in efficiency? And all to achieve a look that lands deeper in the uncanny valley than anyone has ever been.
Except DLSS 5 isn’t just upscaling. It’s replacing the image.
Technically all upscaling replaces the frame with a higher resolution frame.
Even with non-AI upscaling, like linear or bicubic, the original frame isn't copied and then upscaled. The upscaled image is built based on the old image andreplaces the original frame in the frame buffer. DLSS doesn't alter the process, it just uses a neural network instead of a linear/bicubic algorithm.
The new difference with DLSS 5 seems to be that instead of using the frame as the only input it also takes in additional information from earlier in the rendering pipeline (motion vectors) prior to upscaling. This would theoretically create more accurate outputs.
It's kind of like how asking an LLM a question becomes more accurate if you first paste the Wikipedia article which answers your question into the context. Having more information allows for better output quality.
And to achieve what it does, they used one 5090 to render the game normally, and an entire second 5090 just to run DLSS 5.
How is that an improvement in efficiency?
Based on the reporting the use of 2x 5090s in the demo was due to the VRAM requirements of the current iteration, it isn't due to a higher compute requirement. The official DLSS5 release will run on a single card (according to NVIDIA).
It's adding light sources and details that weren't there, which it can't possible keep consistent from one scene to the next.
For the light sources especially, it's removing shadows and adding light in ways that make no physical sense.
Using motion vectors and geometry data isn't new. Previous generations of DLSS as well as framegen were already doing that.
What's new here, is that they stopped inferring details, and started making them up.
The output will not be "more accurate". It can't be.
Even if this model doesn't implement the randomness of other AI tech and remains deterministic, that still won't allow devs to accurately control output for the literally infinite number of potential scenes players can create in a game.
I get your point, I don't think it looks very good on the whole and I almost certainly won't use it.
However, the direction that they're going in inserting it earlier in the rendering chain seems a bit more promising than simply taking a low-res output and making it bigger.
I could easily see having the ability to add properties of materials/shaders which would exclude them from the process. An artist may not care too much about how the grass is enhanced they may want to disable it for parts of a character's model or set pieces in the world.
That kind of thing isn't really possible with DLSS as it stands now (and probably isn't possible with DLSS 5), but the idea of attacking the problem earlier in the rendering sequence is interesting.
but when it comes to gaming, people who want 60FPS or higher can leave the setting on, and people who don't want it can suffer at 20-30FPS if that's what they want.
The problem is that devs have stopped bothering with optimizing games, and instead ship with shit like DLSS or FSR on by default. And the only way to get 60fps is to keep it on.
FYI @TheObviousSolution@thebrainbin.org has been supporting this in every thread that popped up with misinformation and toxic positivity. Likely a bot or a marketing aide.
Be aware the NV's marketing is all over this, even in Lemmy.
One of the many aliases spamming positivity.
Yeah, I just downvoted and moved on. Thought about replying, still have it in draft, but figured it would have been pointless with what the guy wrote even originally and then was proven right when the walls of text with nothing substantial came from it.
This is an alt of TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca, yes. There's another one, alts are not new.
supporting this in every thread that popped up
The support:
-
NVIDIA is an abusive monopoly fueling international cartels partly responsible for the exaggerated PC prices.
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Requires high end GPUs, meaning giving said monopoly more power
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In actual gameplay, motion when the character talks creates this uncanny valley effect.
One of the many aliases spamming positivity.
... I just created this one. I think you just stated your real problem with my comments
positivity.
I'm not completely negative about the technology.
misinformation
This was actually right, before I created the account. Which is why I went through and corrected myself, and have made sure to rectify myself soon after. The purpose of this account is not to spread misinformation, it is to work on my mbin alts.
Okay so ethics debate aside.. it just looks bad? If they get this to work in real time, that's technologically impressive, but it literally just looks like a "slop filter".
- Overtuned contrast
- Overuse of back lighting
- Too many shiny and wet surfaces
- And the worst of all: faces get "yassified" to look like entirely different people - looking more like overly-edited supermodel photos than real people
Yes: hair and skin are notoriously difficult to render well in real time.. but if you're running a model like this, you can probably afford to calculate the SSS properly lol
Or idk. Maybe only run the slop filter on skin and hair. RTGI is already pretty much perfect these days if you do it right
The hogwarts legacy demo was especially egregious. The mesh they applied make that teenager look like a thirty year old with the crap the did. It was absolutely horrible.
And yeah, even the resident evil screen, I know that everyone is focused on the whole AI only fans update, but just the scene behind the character, everything was just brighter, kind of ruining the moody, melancholy look and I'm guessing the intent of the original scene.
RTGI is already pretty much perfect these days if you do it right
Ray Tracing the entire scene looks great. It's also way more computationally expensive than upscaling.
DLSS is just a shortcut, and shortcuts have costs. I don't like the image quality cost so I don't use DLSS (XeSS looks better anyway) and so I just buy more powerful hardware. Someone on a low-end machine can't simply enable raytracing and still have a playable game, DLSS gives them more options.
Remember that Bethesda is owned by Microsoft who wants to increase adoption of this technology for their own financial gain
How would Microsoft benefit from this? I thought they were mainly in the LLM and user information hoarding business.
will all be under our artists' control
Literally impossible. The entire point of the tech is it is autonomous, that it can "improve" things moment by moment. That is by definition outside of their control. Also, it better be fucking optional because only the 1% are playing games with dual-5090s. These fuckers are so out of touch.
Also,
This is a very early look
Motherfucker, you say this is releasing within the year. How is this "very early"? It should be in the polishing up stages by any reasonable, professional timeline.
I've now read more about this and developers DO have a ton of control. They can choose what parts of the image to apply it to and with what intensity. So I guess it's not literally impossible
I don't see why it wouldn't work the same way as shaders. There's just no way a developer making a 3d puzzle game would be forced to have it enabled
You don't understand, once DLSS 5 is released into the wild then nobody will have a choice. It's basically Skynet, the end of the world, Snow Crash, a breach in the Black Wall.
It will install itself the moment a person searches for Godot tutorials and nobody can ever disable it. It would be LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE (didn't you see that they said 'literally'?!) for an artist to control.
~/s~
I hate Nvidia and think this demo (mostly) looks like shit but these hyperbolic reactions are making me feel like the crazy one. I know it's janky and running on 2 cards but it's wild that it's happening in real time and IMO it's really interesting tech. There are so many cool ways this could be applied beyond hyper realism
You're not crazy, you're just reading a topic associated with AI and so it's full of bots, their misinformation and outrage, and the idiots that are influenced by them.
Like all of these threads, we get these insane bad faith 'arguments', misinformation and heavy vote manipulation.
There are certainly valid criticisms about DLSS. It creates visual artifacts, it's often used as a crutch by games to create performance, in the case of DLSS 5 the overall effect is weird as you've said. I agree with a lot of the complaints and I'll probably enable DLSS 5 once and then go back to native... but I think that a lot of comments here are just ridiculous so you're not alone there :P.
I read some more about it and it looks like developers have a lot of granular control. Not just % applied but options per object type. So they can max it out for faces, 50% for water, 25% for foliage, etc.
There are some legitimately awesome use cases for this especially if they let developers train their own models. I didn't play Death Stranding but I know they've got detailed face scans of Norman Reedus...imagine if the Norman filter got applied to his character in-game.
Motherfucker, you say this is releasing within the year. How is this "very early"? It should be in the polishing up stages by any reasonable, professional timeline.
Don't worry, they'll speed up the dev and QA time with AI.
Claiming something is still in progress and that major change can happen before release is a classic tech industry public relations game, and too many “influencers” take it at face value.
It's infuriating.
If this was:
"under our artists' control, and totally optional for players." - Bethesda
Then Nvidia and Bethesda and whoever involved should've said so from the beginning of the release.
Just like Jordan Gerblick from gamesradar says this is obvious damage control as people are justifyably pissed with onslaught of AI slop
Seriously shut the fuck up and give people what we really want:
- affordable reasonably priced GPUs
- stable drivers
- and keep your AI filth out of our stuff and games🖕
It was a matter time for AI slop to came to videogames. But the solution is rather easy, just don't buy those games.
This is no different from any tiktok filter. It's slop, If I wanted my characters to look like nazi Noem I'd design them thusly.
Didnt Todd outright say 'this is the way I would have wanted start field to look'? I swear that was said in the digital foundery video.
This is damage control till we can get it in our hands and hope we forgot we dont like the slop they are feeding their money pigs.
PS: Yassified games will now be $80 and you'll like it.
Time to...
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