A version of Nvidia’s controversial DLSS 5 tech has escaped containment before its official release, and people are jamming it into games that, to be fair to Nvidia, it is not necessarily optimized for yet.
The result has been comedic, off-putting, and for some, just what they’ve always desired. The image above, which has been dubbed “Claude Strife” (I don’t know who made the joke first, but I’ll give it to Brian Bucklew), apparently demonstrates DLSS 5 at extreme settings.
Unlike the DLSS we’re used to, which harnesses machine learning to upscale low-res graphics without deviating too much from the source material, DLSS 5 attempts to improve on the artwork it touches with AI image generation that provides similar results to using the word “photorealism” in a prompt for an AI image model.
I’m not 100% sure that the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth screenshot above is a genuine example of DLSS 5—when I attempted to trace its origin I hit a dead end at a deleted Reddit thread—but it looks quite similar to other images that have come out of experiments with the tech. Stylized characters are clearly not the best use case for it.
The DLSS 5 implementation floating around can also have an aging effect on characters, intensifying skin texture, the separation between cheek and jaw, and dialing up the dourness of expressions that might otherwise come across as neutral.
But there are lots of other examples of DLSS 5 in action that, from a certain perspective, look fine or good. When the settings are tweaked just so, it can make a Starfield character with flat, untextured skin look much more human, for instance. You can see many more examples in the RenoDX Discord channel.
Plenty of people in that channel are delighted by the results they’re getting and seeing from others, but of course there’s also a ResetEra thread aghast at the whole thing. As with most things, opinions are divided.
It doesn’t help that I’m coming to it with pre-existing negative feelings about generative AI, but I land in the ‘not in my house’ camp for now.
Even where DLSS 5 does turn a flat-looking face into something with volume and texture, it has a distinct AI-generated look—like photos of models taken with studio lighting have been stretched over all the faces and bodies. I can’t separate it from the Grok-generated images creeps post on X, or any other off-putting examples of AI slop.
How are you receiving the tech?
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