Digital Foundry has addressed backlash to its coverage of Nvidia's DLSS 5 in a new Q&A video, with site founder Richard Leadbetter saying the team should have taken more time with the material. The reversal comes after Leadbetter and colleague Oliver Mackenzie received death threats following their initial preview of the technology, which shows generative AI being used to achieve more photorealistic lighting, and also altering the faces of gaming characters.
The team went straight from seeing Nvidia's demos into making their video, a decision Leadbetter now regrets. In the follow-up video, Leadbetter acknowledged the excitement of seeing new cutting-edge technology, noting that the original analysis was much broader than the portions that went viral on social media, and that it included detail on the tech's complexities and debates about DLSS 5 imposing its own AI-fuelled vision of reality when rendering games that function as both technical products and works of art.
The broader issue, though, is the technology itself. DLSS 5 works by consuming a game's internal colour and motion vector data for each frame, then running it through an AI model trained to add realistic lighting, subsurface scattering on skin, fabric sheen, and hair-light interactions. The current demo runs at up to 4K resolution but requires two RTX 5090 GPUs, with one card dedicated entirely to the DLSS 5 processing.
Fellow Digital Foundry member Alexander Battaglia raised concerns about the technology's bias, explaining that AI-generated features often show over-averaging and over-perfecting based on training data, adding that he found it ethically problematic when the unique character model of Grace was completely gone. Grace Ashcroft's face, for instance, doesn't just look like it's lit more realistically; she's given fuller lips and sharper cheekbones in the transformation, demonstrating an apparent bias for a certain beauty standard trained into the AI model.
Nvidia's YouTube reveal trailer collected thousands of negative comments within hours, with the before-and-after comparison shots meant to showcase the technology becoming exhibits for the prosecution. Game industry professionals have joined the criticism. Steve Karolewics, a rendering engineer at Respawn, criticised DLSS 5, saying it looks like an overbearing contrast, sharpness, and airbrush filter, with remarkably different frames that don't match the rationale of photo-real lighting.
In response, Nvidia and its partners have attempted damage control. At a GTC 2026 press Q&A, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang claimed that critics are completely wrong, explaining that DLSS 5 fuses controllability of geometry and textures with generative AI, and that developers can fine-tune the generative AI to match their game's visual style. Nvidia told YouTube commenters that game developers have full, detailed artistic control over DLSS 5's effects, with the SDK including intensity, colour grading and masking capabilities.
Major studios including Bethesda, Capcom, Ubisoft, and others are confirmed DLSS 5 partners, with titles including Starfield, Resident Evil Requiem, Assassin's Creed Shadows, and Hogwarts Legacy planned to support the technology. Nvidia and partners insist the demos are early, that developers retain full artistic control, and that the feature will be optional for players, though the online response suggests a departure from the genuine goodwill Nvidia earned with DLSS technology over eight years, which launched in 2018 and steadily improved from resolution upscaling to full frame generation, with DLSS 4.5 drawing 23 out of every 24 on-screen pixels through AI by early 2025, before the March 16, 2026 reveal of DLSS 5.
Dave Oshry, founder and CEO of New Blood Interactive, called the DLSS 5 output AI-generated and worried that younger players won't even know it looks bad or wrong because it will become normal to them. The tension reflects a genuine disagreement about whether rendering fidelity improvements should override the original artistic vision of developers and the creative choices of concept artists, character designers, and directors who shaped these games.