In the latest chapter of the story surrounding Nvidia’s DLSS 5 showcase, a new report has indicated that developers were largely left in the dark about the technology. According to Insider Gaming, developers and artists from across various studios, like Capcom and Ubisoft, said that they found out about DLSS 5 at the same time as the rest of the world—during Nvidia’s showcase.
“We found out at the same time as the public,” said one developer for Ubisoft. The report went on to note that Capcom’s developers were particularly shocked with the company’s involvement with DLSS 5. They described the company as traditionally being quite “anti-AI” for the development of games like this year’s Resident Evil Requiem. There have also apparently been fears about the showcase leading Capcom leadership to change its mind about AI technology and force its implementation into in-development games.
Curiously, the report comes in light of senior director of Global PR of GeForce at Nvidia, Ben Berraondo, taking to social media to say that the inclusion of Resident Evil Requiem in the DLSS 5 showcase was done in collaboration with Capcom, and that the studio’s own team had worked on it. “Game developers have detailed artistic control,” he said.
DLSS 5 was unveiled earlier this week, and almost immediately started facing criticism from journalists as well as developers. According to Nvidia, the technology “takes a game’s color and motion vectors for each frame as input, and uses an AI model to infuse the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to source 3D content and consistent from frame to frame.”
“Bridging the divide between rendering and reality, DLSS 5 empowers game developers to deliver a new level of photoreal computer graphics previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects.”
Many have called out the changes made by the technology to various characters as essentially being like AI-generated images turning “everyone into yassified, looks-maxed freaks,” as noted by Noclip’s Danny O’Dwyer. RPGSite’s Alex Donaldson called the effect “uncanny & weird”, and noted that artistic expression was at risk.
When asked about this, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had his own statement, saying that everyone criticising DLSS is “completely wrong”. He went on to say that, “The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI.”
“It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level,” he continued after noting that developers and artists will have plenty of control over the outputs of DLSS 5.
“All of that is in the control — direct control — of the game developer,” he explained. “This is very different than generative AI; it’s content-control generative AI. That’s why we call it neural rendering.”
The level of control was further expanded on by Nvidia through a pinned comment under its DLSS 5 Showcase, where it said: “Important to note with this technology advance – game developers have full, detailed artistic control over DLSS 5’s effects to ensure they maintain their game’s unique aesthetic.”
“The SDK includes things like intensity, color grading and masking off places where the effect shouldn’t be applied. It’s not a filter – DLSS 5 inputs the game’s color and motion vectors for each frame into the model, anchoring the output in the source 3D content.”
DLSS 5 doesn’t yet have a release date. It is slated to come to all GeForce RTX 50-series GPU users later this year.