When Nvidia unveiled DLSS 5 this week, the response from the gaming industry was swift and overwhelmingly negative. Just about everyone online hated the AI slop faces and radical visual changes DLSS 5 added to games like Starfield. Developers described the technology as destructive to their work, gamers mocked it on social media, and technical analysts questioned the company's messaging.
Into this storm stepped Daniel Vávra, creative director of Warhorse Studios and creator of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Vávra posted on X that developers may eventually train the technology for particular art styles or character faces, and that "this is just a little uncanny beginning. No way haters will stop this." He argued the technology could eventually replace expensive rendering techniques like ray tracing.
Vávra's defence stands in stark isolation. After talking to a bunch of developers, it appears the people who make games are not on board for Nvidia's AI-enhanced future, with one gameplay designer stating the technology represents "a disconnect between what we as developers and gamers want." One anonymous game developer told Kotaku that after seeing DLSS 5, "it feels like there is no future for me" in the video game industry.
The core complaint from artists and developers centres on artistic control. Nvidia has made overwriting the original graphics the point, with Grace Ashcroft's face being given fuller lips and sharper cheekbones in the transformation, demonstrating an apparent bias for a certain beauty standard trained into the AI model. Artist Karla Ortiz argued the technology was "disrespectful to the intentional art direction of devs," suggesting that if developers wanted to lean into hyper-realism, they would have done so themselves.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded to criticism by insisting that developers maintain "direct control" over how DLSS 5 is implemented. Yet an Nvidia employee contradicted Huang's statement, confirming that DLSS 5 takes a 2D frame plus motion vectors as input, rather than working at the geometry level as Huang claimed, directly contradicting his previous statement that "it's generative control at the geometry level."
The transparency problems extend to how the technology was introduced. Developers at studios with support for DLSS 5, including Capcom and Ubisoft, told Insider Gaming that they found out about the announcement at the same time as the public. The developers of the games that were shown found out about it at the same time as everyone else.
Some developers remain unconvinced that greater developer control over the technology will solve the underlying problem. Critics argue that Vávra's implication that the technology will be fine-tuned by developers to avoid overriding artistic style is naive, noting that executives will try to use this technology to cut important corners, as they have with almost every other piece of AI technology before now.
Some analysts question whether the prohibitive hardware requirements could stop DLSS 5 from becoming widespread, noting that the demo used two RTX 5090s, which would cost the average gamer around $8,000.
DLSS 5 is scheduled to ship in autumn. The question facing Nvidia is whether developer concerns and scepticism will moderate adoption when the technology reaches market, or whether the company's market dominance in graphics hardware will force acceptance regardless of industry reservations. For now, Vávra stands as a notable outlier in a field united against him.