Gamers hate Nvidia’s DLSS 5. And developers aren’t crazy about it either

After a day of overwhelming and widespread rejection, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doubled down on his stance and said gamers are “completely wrong” about DLSS. (You know how much players love to be told they’re wrong.) But the developers at Capcom and Ubisoft say they didn’t even know what the tech demo would look like, and according to Insider Gaming, they found out at the same time as everyone else and were completely amazed. (Nvidia, Ubisoft, and Capcom did not immediately respond to our request for comment.)

“I think the reaction from players is understandable,” Marwan Mahmoud, a game developer at Incrypt, wrote in an email to WIRED. “Some games are starting to rely too heavily on these technologies instead of focusing on proper optimization. From a developer perspective, it feels a little different because you see DLSS as a tool that helps rather than a core solution.”

The issue facing many people, including developers, is the one-size-fits-all approach to technology that can adjust visuals across different game genres.

“An artist has a style, an artist has an art direction that you’re going to give him, and that’s something the AI ​​doesn’t respect all the time,” says Raul Izquierdo, an independent game developer in Mexico. “Maybe I don’t want my characters to be personalized.”

Bates agrees, saying he doesn’t think every game has to be real. This sentiment is also echoed by game developer Sterling Reams, who has worked at Striking Distance Studios and Zynga. “People just want better games,” Rhimes wrote in a letter to WIRED. “That’s as clear as I can tell.

At GTC, Nvidia ran its demo on its most powerful consumer graphics cards, the two GeForce RTX 5090s. If Nvidia had made its selling point for the technology to save resources, thus enabling older hardware to deliver more impressive graphics, there might have been something to it.

“What’s the point if you won’t do it on weaker hardware?” Izquierdo says. “If this is done on [RTX 2080 graphics card]For example, I think I would think differently about it. Well, this is to improve gamer experiences and everything, not just to sell graphics cards.”

Ultimately, Nvidia’s demo, and GTC more generally, was a showcase of the company’s strength in AI. Bates posits that the reaction is about humans coping not only with crossing the uncanny valley, but also with what happens when we reach the other side.

“Right now, it’s pretty clear what they have to do to prove their prowess as an AI company,” Bates says. “But the reality is that this will be the default in a few years, and no one will think twice about it. It’s Jensen’s world, and we’re just living in it.”