To say that the reveal of NVIDIA DLSS 5 at GTC 2026 sparked a controversy on social media would be the understatement of the year. Despite strong praise from veteran tech journalists who experienced the in-person demo, such as Digital Foundry and Ryan Shrout, and the reassurance from both NVIDIA and game studios like Bethesda that the (work-in-progress) tech is fully under developer control and optional anyway, the vocal anti-AI crowd hasn't stopped condemning NVIDIA's newest DLSS addition for being "just an AI filter" and "disrespectful of the developer's original design".
However, DLSS 5 also has its proponents, including veteran game artist Georgian Avasilcutei, whose industry credits include triple-A games like Remember Me and Life is Strange at DONTNOD, Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider at Arkane, and Hogwarts Legacy at Avalanche Software.
In an X post, Avasilcutei attacked most of the people who are bashing NVIDIA's new technology for being ignorant of what's actually going on behind the scenes with it. He noted that, unlike what some folks seem to believe, this is no mere hallucination-prone, prompt-based generator, but instead a model that reuses the exact same information from the game to augment its lighting and shading.
To prove his point, he showed a comparison picture of a character model he personally worked on in two different lighting conditions: regular rasterization and ray traced lighting. The use of more accurate lighting, as well as hair and skin shaders, produces a result that, upon careful analysis, appears to have slightly different features from the original (the nose's ridge, for one). That happens without changing the actual facial shape at all. He also added that any artist would like to see their work in the best possible lighting, but that's usually impossible due to real-time rendering limitations that NVIDIA aims to supersede with DLSS 5. This is essentially the same argument made by Bethesda's Todd Howard, who, according to Digital Foundry, said this tech makes his original vision for Starfield and Oblivion Remastered a reality.
After this whole debate about DLSS 5, I came to the conclusion that most of the people talking about it are completely unaware of what they don't know…they're on the peak of ignorance and don't even grasp how little they understand. They just heard generative AI, and like Pavlov's dog, they just start drooling, thinking it's the same **** as unethical slop image generators…for the love of Christ…go and educate yourself before raging on the internet for no reason.
DLLS 5 is not a prompt-based generator…it's not creating stuff based on someone else's images and hallucinates results. It uses the information from the raster to build up a final render frame with the same information but with better lighting and shading…
I'll even give you an example on how much of an impact better shading and lighting has. This is a character I've worked on not long ago. On the left, you have a raster render with some bad shaders. On the right, you have a render with ray tracing on, a much better shader for both hair and skin. They don't even look like the same person…do they? This is what DLSS 5 is doing….getting a result like the one on the right(tbh a lot better) at a smaller cost than actually rendering it. Still the same geo, same textures, same light sources.
Some of you will go and say the one on the left is better, and it's the artist's vision. It's not…it's just the artist's limitation due to shading and lighting constraints. Every single artist out there would love to get the right result in real time.
Avasilcutei also posted a modified Dunning–Kruger effect graph where most of the people talking (negatively) about DLSS 5 are situated on the peak of "Mount Stupid", having absolute confidence but also nearly zero competence in the subject. The artist used it to underline, provocatively, that most DLSS 5 naysayers have failed to fundamentally understand the technology, stopping at a much more superficial level once they learned of AI involvement.
Jabs aside, Avasilcutei's argument is one that most artists and photographers are already familiar with: a human face can look dramatically different based on the angle and lighting conditions, which is why portraits have historically been crafted with special care on both accounts to bring out the best features of an individual while hiding the less conventionally attractive features. It's no coincidence that classical portrait painters developed techniques like Rembrandt lighting specifically to sculpt facial features with shadow, or that Hollywood productions employ dedicated Directors of Photography to ensure actors are always shown in their most flattering light. DLSS 5, in Avasilcutei's opinion, is simply bringing that same level of lighting craft to real-time rendering with the power of AI.
Undoubtedly, there will be more reactions on both sides of the DLSS 5 debate. We'll be here to collect the most interesting takes and report them ahead of the planned Fall 2026 launch. Stay tuned.
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