Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang downplayed criticism of DLSS 5 at a press Q&A with Tom's Hardware during GTC 2026, the company's showcase event for its new AI and neural rendering technology that aims to make game graphics more photorealistic. His defence came as the technology faces what may be one of the harshest public reactions to a graphics feature in recent memory.
DLSS 5 uses an AI model to alter the visuals of supported games with what Nvidia calls "photoreal lighting and materials", moving beyond previous iterations that simply upscaled resolution or improved frame rates. Nvidia debuted DLSS 5 at GTC 2026 to make existing games more realistic through AI.
Much of the criticism has focused on the updated appearances of Resident Evil Requiem's Grace Ashcroft and Leon Kennedy. Online discourse surrounding DLSS 5 has been overwhelmingly negative, with some calling it AI slop, while others have lamented the damage DLSS 5 wreaks on artistic vision. According to an online survey by gaming news site IGN, nearly 70% of respondents said the graphics represented "too much AI slop," while just 21% described it as "the future."
The core complaint is straightforward: Nvidia's demonstrations show character faces transformed with what gamers describe as beauty filter treatments. Grace Ashcroft looks like a totally different person, with distinctly higher cheekbones and fuller lips, leading to the sense that DLSS 5 has applied AI beauty standards despite Nvidia's claim that developers will retain artistic control. One narrative director at FailBetter Games called this AI beauty standard the "Scarlett Johansesonification of videogames."
Yet Huang rejected this characterisation entirely. "Well, first of all, they're completely wrong," Huang said in response to a Tom's Hardware question about the criticism. He explained that DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI. Developers can fine-tune the generative AI to match their style, and DLSS 5 adds generative capability to the existing geometry of the game without changing artistic control.
Huang said it is not post-processing at the frame level, but rather generative control at the geometry level, and developers can try the tool to see how they want to use it, whether creating a toon shader effect or making the game look like glass. In damage control posted to social media, Nvidia noted that game developers have full, detailed artistic control over DLSS 5's effects, with the SDK including intensity, colour grading and masking off places where the effect shouldn't be applied, and that DLSS 5 inputs the game's colour and motion vectors for each frame into the model, anchoring the output in the source 3D content.
The technology does have defenders. Some argue that the knee-jerk "it's just a face filter" take does not hold up once you've actually seen the full scope of what DLSS 5 is doing across an entire scene, across multiple games, in real time. DLSS 5 closes a significant gap in photorealistic rendering, and because facial improvements are the area where the difference between before and after is most visible, that is what everyone is reacting to.
There are practical concerns beyond aesthetics. The early preview demo shown at GTC ran on two GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards: one dedicated to rendering the game while the other was dedicated to running the DLSS 5 model, though Nvidia says it will run on a single GPU at release. Performance remains a significant question, with experts noting that it is seriously computationally intensive, and if gamers are turning ray tracing off in today's games, they may do the same for DLSS 5.
The DLSS 5 announcement has been met with significant criticism on social media from games industry professionals, partly due to how it drastically alters the original art direction of its supported games. One developer stated that "the artwork created by artists has a solid intention behind it, and if that can't be controlled, it has no meaning."
For Australian gamers and developers watching from afar, DLSS 5 represents a larger tension in the technology industry: the push to automate and standardise creative work versus the desire to preserve individual artistic intent. Major publishers including Bethesda, Capcom, NCSoft, Tencent, and Warner Bros. Games are already onboard, suggesting the technology will shape game graphics for years to come, regardless of this initial backlash.
There is a chance that Nvidia is taking note of negative feedback, resulting in DLSS 5 releasing in a better state come autumn 2026. Whether the company can bridge the gap between technological capability and artistic control remains to be seen.