NVIDIA CEO Says Video Game Fans Are 'Completely Wrong' About The Controversial DLSS 5 Announcement

Yesterday, NVIDIA announced NVIDIA DLSS 5, its next evolution of the AI upscaling technology. The announcement was accompanied by a video demonstration of some of the possibilities with the new software. Fans immediately blasted NVIDIA for its perceived push of AI take over video game art direction. Now, the CEO of NVIDIA has responded to the backlash.

In a press Q&A with Tom's Hardware, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was asked about the fan response to yesterday's announcement. Huang said, "Well, first of all, they're completely wrong."

Huang expanded his statement, saying, "The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the of geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI."

Huang clarified that video game developers will be able to "fine-tune the generative AI" to match the intended vision of the developers and that "doesn't change the artistic control."

Huang added that developers are welcome to try to use the tool for their video game development process. "All of that is in the control — direct control — of the game developer," he said. This is very different than generative AI; it’s content-control generative AI. That’s why we call it neural rendering."

The DLSS 5 presentation video was met with extreme negative backlash, with many fans creating memes and making a joke out of the entire announcement. One of the biggest problems fans seemed to have with the video was the drastic change in character model faces, most notably Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem. The upscaling software was even compared by a lot of fans to filters found on Instagram and TikTok.

The official NVIDIA GeForce X account has been reposting press impressions of the DLSS 5 software, but the damage might be done for the foreseeable future, and with Huang telling all gamers they're wrong when they themselves saw the video of the software's capabilities, the negative attention to NVIDIA and DLSS 5 is likely going to continue.

Video game fans, especially after the industry has seen virtually endless layoffs over the past few years, seem to be on high alert for any use of generative AI in modern video game design.