The reveal of DLSS 5 was pretty much the biggest thing to happen in PC gaming last month, and also one of the most contentious. Indeed, our own team reacted with a whole heap of different emotions, from general antipathy to vitriolic ranting. In fact only a few of us were in any way measured in our response.
So we thought we’d leave things to calm down a touch, assess what DLSS 5 might actually be doing behind the scenes—turns out it might not be as smart as we might have hoped—and let the dust settle before taking the temperature of PC Gamer readers.
We put the question to you last week: Could Nvidia convince you to use DLSS 5? And, honestly, the answers are not all that surprising.
I’m not surprised that the majority of readers said they would never use the technology, with a full 71% of answers to the poll responding they could not be convinced to turn the feature on. But I have to say I’m a little surprised that, out of those polled, 37%—the largest percentage of responses—said it wouldn’t matter how good the feature looked, they were ethically opposed to it, and would never enable it.
I will say that is probably quite an easy thing to say right now, with just a few screenshots of Starfield, FC26, and yassified Grace filling our minds’ eyes, but if we get a little more clarity from Nvidia and devs on how it’s used, and a new game comes out that looks amazing and plays brilliantly on a single GPU, I think at least some of those respondents might have their faith tested.
I do find it interesting that 10% of readers are already convinced and are all ready to go DLLS On with the new AI-powered feature when it arrives in the fall (if it is indeed still going to be released that soon). There are also another 9% of respondants who would happily enable it in certain games. That’s largely where I’ve ended up; where something that doesn’t have a distinct art style and is going for photorealism as a goal, such as FC26, does actually look better than the original.
Just needs to not be an absolute resource hog to do it, though…
Finally, we have 10% saying they would happily enable it if the games looked better than the very AI-gen look they have in the first promo material. Which is a fair enough assessment given that we’re talking about a single model, extrapolating all the context for a frame from a single, static, 2D image and some motion vectors. There’s a real chance that if Nvidia and the devs aren’t careful an uncomfortable level of homogeneity would be our future.
The results weren’t so cut and dried when we asked you about switching to Linux, where 43% of you have , or will be switching to gaming on Linux this year. And this week we’ve also been asking you about your preferred gaming resolution. Anything 4:3, right?
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