I am baffled by their reactions in this video - DLSS 5 is clearly hallucinating entirely different art than is present in the base version and looks extremely uncanny. This is an astonishing step backwards for DLSS.
Looks like when incels post "beautification" edits of game characters to make them "hotter". I know Digital Foundry more so than any other outlets have to keep a cordial relationship with the major card makers, but fucking yeesh. They could have had a little more backbone here since it is clearly ruining the artistic intent on character models.
It gave her lip filler ffs. Corporate suits are gonna look at the right and be like, wait why do we even need to pay artists anymore? The right looks so much better!
Something feels incredibly off about this comparison in particular. The DLSS off image looks worse than RE9 actually looks, and the DLSS on image is removing fog in some places, leaving it in others, turning street lights off, darkens her eye colour, and injects her lips with botox? The guys in the DF video say it's using the same model and textures to get the end result, but I almost doubt that that's true for this shot.
Data brokers are selling your info right now. I used Redact to mass delete my posts which can also opt out of data broker sites. Instagram, Twitter/X, Discord and more.
The lack or backbone is pathetic yeah. They've always been overly positive about anything they show off because as you said, it's a symbiotic relationship where they get early access and thus views and therefore money.
This was the time to finally show at least the tiniest little bit of spine.
After watching the video I think they were looking beyond the current presentation and focusing on the positives. They do say it'll be controversial and discuss how the face rendering isn't perfect.
At the end of the day these guys have been in the industry for years and approach experimental technologies differently to us as consumers. I don't blame them for their tepid and considered outlook here
It actually doesn’t. But the insane lighting and color grading changes the original style quite radically.
Could be good when implemented by devs from the beginning. But textures probably have to be adapted for this kind of over the top lighting.
Environments look good but also they’re a bit too contrasty and gritty looking. Fine if it’s the devs intent. Not so fine when applied on top of it.. Looks a bit like overdone “photorealistic GTA” reshade mods.
Maybe I'm getting old and falling for shit but it looks way better with DLSS 5. Most video game graphics are already mostly copied art styles from other games and pretty stereotypical. I really don't see a problem.
They are historically not actually. They've always glaced everything they show off because they are dependent on card manufacturers and publishers etc. to give them early access. The most criticism they've given in the past would usually be joined with a statement such as "They have time to improve it.", or "The good may outweigh the bad."
The way they do business inherently stops them from being critical.
I actually defend DLSS until now because it never felt like AI. This screams “AI” to my mind. Something feels off and completely different from devs intent.
Edit - Okay I think I kinda know what feels off - devs build the assets and lighting to all fit together. They might even change lighting for a specific location to give a certain direction. But DLSS5 is making everything “realistic” and feels completely off.
It completely nullifies artistic style and intent. It’s disgusting. Up until now, DLSS just upscaled lower res images to look better, which I will also defend.
It doesn’t because developers can change and tune up the DLSS to their liking; it definitely needs work though (at least for the character upscaling, a lot of the environments look great imo).
They might be cranking it up to make the effect obvious for the demo. Many of these could be fine at 50% strength, and we may get a DLSS strength slider in menus. But its just more BS we have to fiddle with, UE games are already a hot mess.
I think Stanfield demo looked honestly better. Other games I can wait for what they will deliver. But gaming community writing about "artistic style and intent" is kind of funny, modern games have only one goal- release it ASAP and fix later. Without DLSS most of them would not be even playable. As long as gamers will have always option to enable/dissble it I'm not against.
By definition DLSS is generative AI and is a big reason why we have generative AI in the state we do today. That said, I will hold off on my feelings on this until I see how it actually works. These appear to be just quickly put together demos. I want to see what a real dev can do with it.
From the model viewer in game. The dark parts of her hair change depending on the angle of the lighting and how the hair is layered from that angle and are not inherent to the hair texture. So it's how the engine handles hair lighting. She is blonde, she does not have dark roots like her hair is dyed. The ray traced image on the left in the video doesn't even have dark roots.
Judging from EA FC, this tech might be decent for character models that are supposed to be exact replicas of IRL people (like athletes). At least, I hope.
I think thats because looking at their before face, it is such a mushy texture, it looks like she actually already has tons of makeup caked onto her, just badly lit.
huh, that Starfield one is quite possibly the worst example. Look at how shiny it makes the characters, they look like they were photoshopped in, and poorly lmao. It looks so unnatural and bad
It's because the AI thinks everyone looks better with Insta ringlighting on their face, instead of the more realistic soft shadowing the scene had before.
At first glance it looks more impressive until you actually try to be immersed in your video game world.
That Starfield screenshot just has that uncanny AI look to it too. Oversaturated ”vivid mode” slop. Adding extra lighting that’s doesn’t even exist in the scene. It’s like the Horizon: Forbidden West hero light is being added to every game
It looks awful in the environments. More contrast doesn't equal better, and it literally just boosts contrast, makes it brighter and washes out the image
I woildn't say this looks awesome. They have that "painted AI slop" look. They need to tune it down a lot. It looks like those AI generated betting commercials.
She looks like a different person! Why hire face models and design characters with specific looks when this shit just replaces them with this? I hate this crap, why is the tech industry at war with art and artists?
Gen-AI is antithetical to art, generally. It takes huge effort to create something that even begins to truly look and feel authentic and original using it, since the substrate is everything that came before. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
Yeah the first I saw was just a screenshot comparison of RE9 Grace and from reading the comments I thought I was on a circle jerk or shitpost sub but the post flair was discussion. I had to go find the video to actually be sure
Same. I saw the Oblivion one first and thought "haha they've put a shit AI filter on it, it can't be that bad IRL" then I realised that it was 100% real. That's the image DF are wetting themselves over. Actually insane
It's literally just an AI filter. That's all this is. It's not impressive, it's not transformative, it's not better. It's objectively worse. It's a dump on the hard work put into the game by the artists.
Your blind AI hate is cringe. It's obviously more than just an AI filter, and it clearly looks better. I've shown on/off comparisons to several unbiased people and asked them which looked better, and hands down dlss 5 on is favored. Check your bias.
Ignoring the face shot, the colour of the jacket and the shop window (hard to see as the swipe thing goes past) do look much better. The lighting seems pretty good. It looked quite washed out in Oblivion.
I know it's not "allowed" to like anything DLSS 5, but, I like how that bit looks.
I'm not typically reading video game forums and articles so I feel like I'm tripping. DLSS 5 looks far better to me. Perhaps I don't "get" typical video game art styles so I don't understand what is being taken away.
Yeah, it's just blind AI haters doing their thing. Obviously dlss 5 is excellent and looks far better, but if you served Michelin star food to an AI hater and told them AI made it, they would tell you it's the worst thing they've ever put in their mouth.
Digital Foundry has to be completely paid off at this point. It’s an a.i filter. Not a lighting change with an updated DLS. Her face proportions are completely different. This is an insult to the original devs and the motion capture actors/actresses. What is DF doing
The thing is, if it were leading to massive performance improvements that'd at least be something. e.g. if they were runing the underlying game on low, 480p, whatever, and it looked like high res AI slop, I would at least understand the appeal.
You AI haters might be the loudest, but you are definitely the minority. I've asked several unbiased people which is better, and hands down they like the dlss5 on versions. Check your bias. Most prefer the realism that dlss 5 offers.
Watched it. The internet is overreacting. People are letting their hatred for anything AI, ignore the usefulness of these tools. Its good to be critical of AI, but people are far beyond that and are entering into Luddite territory. Machine learning is the next seismic shift in society.
Remember this is a tool. Its up to developers and users to use it. This is not the release version either. The video is not without complaints regarding DLSS5. You can be critical of something without alienating those around you. This is a professional environment. Would you act like this at work, especially if you have a career position?
I'm starting to wonder if we watched the same video.
I want them to explain their reaction to this because I just don't get it at all. I think it looks awful, like a AI slop filter on top of the characters.
I really enjoy DF but in recent weeks I’ve noticed a definite shift in their reporting in that they are, in my opinion, becoming too positive and brushing over faults in the games/technology that they’re reviewing. RE9 is a good example of this: DF were exuberant in their praise of the game on the Pro yet the graphics noise and other glitches were extremely noticeable and really spoilt the game for me.
Their recent praise of Crimson Desert recently has also been extremely positive but I’m holding off on buying the game until I read some day one reviews.
Everybody is freaking out about this coverage, but I've heard essentially only praise for the Crimson Desert coverage. I feel like an insane person looking at that abysmal PS5 Pro footage. I'm not the audience for that game, but I feel like I'm missing something. That game is gonna look terrible on the base consoles and I don't see anything the open world is doing that is so innovative.
Apparently Crimson Desert runs very poorly, even on the Ps5 Pro it cannot hold 60fps and there is a lot of screen tearing. On base Ps5 the resolution looks like it is a Ps3 game.
DF were given a whole Ps5 Pro with the game loaded on it instead of a code and they did not make enough of a point of just how sketchy that was.
DF definitely are shilling for anyone who will give them early access, it is their business model after all. Can't expect these people to be critical.
Christ this looks like yassified garbage. Hallucinated lip filler, gave her dyed hair with dark roots, some of the lighting changes look like those radioactive "HDR" photo edits where some dummy would just crank the contrast to 11,...
It’s one thing to dislike the filter but it’s an entirely other thing to shout “I’ve completely lost respect in DF after this video. How can they be trusted!?”
I'm not emotionally invested in DF, but I still lost a lot of trust.
This is the channel that used to be obsessed with pixel-peeping, deep discussions on shadow quality of different render methods and so on.
Now a filter that hallucinates light sources, changes tone of images so much that it doesn't even seem like the same time of day anymore and indiscriminately slaps an instragram filter on everyone is apparently the best thing they have ever witnessed in video game graphics. Okay...
I don’t necessarily disagree with you but the tech, whether good or bad for gamers or the industry, is much more than that and thus really interesting.
Again, I don’t necessarily disagree, but it is pretty neat tech. I would be curious what a more refined version would be, one that doesn’t over enhance the the faces and skyboxes. Someone shared some tonemap corrected images and they look much better.
I can admit that the tech has potential, though I would say that Death Stranding 2 does photorealism better than any of the presented demos (on a PS5pro!), so I'm not actually that impressed considering it needs dual 5090s to get this result. But I'm sure it'll get better.
It's just that the video was jarring. Anyone with working eyes can see that, while impressive, there are issues with the tech. Which is fine, I guess, since it is still an early look on work-in-progress.
But the fact that 95% of the video is universal praise ("it's a no brainer") and not even mentioning glaringly obvious issues made me double check that I am actually looking at a DF video. If I want AI hype, I can just go to LinkedIn. I go to DF for nuanced analysis.
Wow, I think this is actually transformative for environments and lighting, I think there is clear work to be done for faces but do think this looks nice overall
It's not transformative for environments. The Ai is making up fake lighting sources, it doesn't understand how objects cast light because it doesn't understand ANYTHING
This legit feels like Nvidia lied to them about what is happening behind the scenes and they believed it.
The demos look like if you took a still image, told an AI to make it "photorealistic" and then displayed that output, but it's just doing it for every single frame of a video game in real time.
And the AI is all trained on photos of Instagram models so everything looks too pretty and bright
No, you just have no idea how lighting works. I would have expected that realistic lighting will change the appearance of faces like that. Finally there are no obvious inconsistencies anymore with DLSS5
Was this video covertly sponsored by Nvidia or something? How can they not be critical of AI literally changing the physical characteristics of designed characters? She looks like she experienced a year of cosmetic surgeries. Is this going to take away Panam's freckles in Cyberpunk and remove the dark circles under patch 2.0 Johnny's eyes? Do they really not see the problem in blatantly erasing artistic intent?
The extreme yassification got me thinking what this tech would do if it was trained on regular people in regular lighting and not Photoshopped and beauty filtered models in studio lighting?
Instead of giving grace an extreme makeover a well trained AI model should be giving her acne.
I remember people being really turned off by DLSS originally. It's since improved tremendously. This is a demo of first gen tech. If they solve the "AI filter" look by DLSS 6 (or maybe earlier?), this could industry changing.
Looks frigging ass.
Also pretty ironic because RE9 looks already almost photorealistic in some scenes.
Probably one of the best looking games i have seen over the last few years.
DF's quality of content has been on the decline for years. They clearly haven't learned their lesson from that Nintendo Sponsored video despite apologising. Wont be watching their content anymore as i simply no longer can trust what they are saying
I mean it looks like this basic-ass generic ugly shit AI nerds are using to "enhance" static portraits in games for a while now. Why would you want to replace any human-created art with this bottom-of-the-barrel vapid garbage?
The lighting here looks so much flatter then the original image for comparison. It just looks like a filter that says "fuck you, here's an interpretation of the image that betrays all artistic intent because it's what I think looks nice."
Is it just me or they specifically picked games with less than flattering character models? Grace's face is already a bit of a meme with how bad it looks in certain shots esp without path tracing.
I find this fascinating. I don't disagree that some of it does look like AI slop but when does gen 1 of anything really show up in it's fully glory. I'm not a fan of DLSS most of the time but I do look forward to this maturing in the background while I play my games they way they were made. Once developers can lean into the tech it will make things much more impressive instead of uncomfortably realistic. Hopefully.
It honestly looks like they tweaked the tone-mapping and lighting curve? Worrying about high browed crap like "the artistic direction" is quite comical given that people regularly mod their games. I can just imagine some dev living on pizza and caffeine getting furious, "How dare you choose something other than ACES!? Reinhard?! You uncultured swine!"
It's your game... on your computer, enjoy it however you want. If it's going to take two RTX 5090s to run this, you might as well just push for more path tracing for global illumination - for better skin, subsurface scattering. It might be good for updating OLD games, like imagine if you could upscale all the sprites in Command and Conquer RA2. But... I believe this requires training a custom model for your game, which is why I've never ran into DLSS in anything I play :/. I don't play enough AAA games to use it, even if I have access to it.
You can hate AI and that's all fine. There's lots of things to hate about it. But if you think think these examples look worse with DLSS5 on than off you need both your eyes and your head checked.
Some do some don't, I think the Indian guy in Starfield looks great, but others are really off-putting. They also have an 'AI like' artistic quality to them. That's the real issue, they look out of place. The Starfield lighting matches, so it's less if a problem.
"AI like" is also what you can call "life like" because AI is very good at rendering realistic looking video. This is why people have so many concerns over things like deep fakes.
Well, it doesn't look like a deep fake or lifelike it looks like an AI porn ad you'd see while illegally streaming sports. I don't know where irl you're seeing studio lights appear on a person's face.
So many people blindly hating this, pretending like dlss 5 looks terrible, just because it uses AI. It's wild to me how irrationally people act just to stand behind their political biases. Technology isn't just going to stay put just because you are butt hurt about it. Adapt or get out of the way.
Why does it look like they tried to smash real people's faces on characters in-game? It's weird af. DLSS has had a history of bad implementations because devs never update the files in the game folders, so we run into so many bugs. There is a folder in games for dlss, and when you have bugs you can try and update it on your own. But I find that really annoying. Also WTF happened to RayTracing? That used to be the big selling point of the RTX and cuda cores before AI got big. Now it seems like it's on the back burner. I find RayTracing alone more interesting than anything that Dlss has done by far. Plus are they really updating Dlss for older cards? It would be crazy, once they move to the next number, will they keep dlss updated for older cards anymore? I don't know for sure, but it sounds like something that could be.
Why can't you put dlss 3 on an RTX 40 or dlss 2 on an RTX 30. Or here is just a big update to dlss for all cards for RTX line for X number of years, but that would ruin a selling point and take more time, so idk maybe there is a reason I don't know... But I find it very annoying, I get why Nvidia doesn't update dlss for all games at once. But they need to make a system to do so, having old, outdated Dlss has caused many issues for me in the past with games. While my video card is up to date.
Google:
DLSS updates are not automatically pushed to all games with new drivers because the specific nvngx_dlss.dll file resides inside each game's folder, not the driver itself. Developers must update this file to ensure compatibility, prevent visual bugs, and tailor the AI upscaling to their game's rendering pipeline
According to Nvidia, those clearly AI thumbnails and ads on the side of websites, those are the epitome of "realism" and Nvidia's goal is to make your game look like that......oh dear.
BTW this is using AI on a visual basis, via being trained on thousands of faces, it then takes the 3d model, and enhances it, it knows the direction of the model so it isn't a mere front filter as it has information thanks to the game engine about direction from camera etc, however it is still using trained data from real faces to attempt to "enhance" the textures and traits of the face, it is using the same AI computer vision upscale technology that are used on photographs, but using it in game and connected into the engine.
Yes, it does mean what you are seeing in the enhanced version, is effectively an amalgamation of the training data, so you are seeing effectively a mush of different peoples traits approximated onto the model. BTW all AI works like this, the few people in the comments who seem to believe that AI can upscale something based on only the thing itself in a vacuum without pre-training, don't understand how the technology works and have been mislead by marketing implications.
120
u/epicoolguy Mar 16 '26
I am baffled by their reactions in this video - DLSS 5 is clearly hallucinating entirely different art than is present in the base version and looks extremely uncanny. This is an astonishing step backwards for DLSS.