Just hours after Nvidia showed off its DLSS 5 AI-powered rendering engine that promises to deliver photorealistic gaming graphics, some gamers are worried it would actually make games less realistic or enjoyable.
Among the numerous ironic reactions online, one put it rather succinctly: “AI slop is coming to gaming, finally!”
The reaction is a little surprising since DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, has been speeding up gaming graphics in PCs since 2018.
By using AI to generate additional frames of the action in each game, the technology has enabled more details like facial features and texture in water to be generated by adding to the horsepower from a user’s graphics card.
Now in its latest iteration, DLSS promises to deliver “photorealistic” lighting and materials to make games even more realistic.
Unveiled by Nvidia head honcho Jensen Huang at the company’s annual GTC event just hours ago, DLSS 5 uses an AI trained to understand components in a scene, like characters, hair, fabric and skin.
It also understands how a scene is lit, if the light source shining at a character in the front, back or overhead, for example, according to Nvidia.
At least from Nvidia’s samples, one big plus would be facial features on characters, which gaming graphics have always found challenging to mimic, despite improvements in recent years.
In its demos, Nvidia showed off snazzy examples of popular games like Starfield, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Resident Evil: Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy and more.
Publishers and developers such as Bethesda and Capcom are among the partners signed on to back Nvidia’s latest breakthrough.
Their input will be important in making this new AI-driven technology work in actual games. After all, they don’t want a character based on a person to look exaggerated after AI has guessed how he or she might look.
Calling DLSS 5 a “GPT moment for graphics”, Huang said the technology blended handcrafted rendering with generative AI to deliver visual realism while preserving creative control by developers.
The demo that Nvidia showed off reportedly made use of two top-end GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards costing more than S$5,000 each.
DLSS 5 is expected to run on single graphics cards when it arrives more optimised towards the end of this year, though there’s been no confirmation which cards support it yet.
