In light of the recent criticisms faced by Nvidia for its DLSS 5 presentation, CEO Jensen Huang has gone on record to say that players complaining about it are “completely wrong”. Responding to Tom’s Hardware’s editor-in-chief Paul Acorn at GTC 2026, Huang spoke about DLSS 5 offering developers more control over their art than ever before, and how it uses generative AI with this control.
“Well, first of all, they’re completely wrong,” Huang said. “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.” Further in his statement, he noted that developers will continue to have power to “fine-tune the generative AI” according to the output they want, and that it “doesn’t change the artistic control.”
“It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level,” he said.
Huang has also confirmed that developers will be able to configure DLSS 5’s development kit to come up with a “toon shader” for a less photo-realistic style, or if the game should look like everything is “made of glass”.
“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.”
Huang’s statement echoes Nvidia’s own pinned comment under the YouTube video of its DLSS 5 showcase. The company noted that DLSS 5 won’t simply be an “AI filter” applied on top of a game’s visuals. Instead, the technology will be able to make use of information it gets directly from the game before outputting new visuals.
“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,” wrote Nvidia. “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.”
Among the games used by Nvidia to showcase DLSS 5’s features was Resident Evil Requiem, with comparison screenshots immediately facing plenty of criticism from journalists and developers alike. Noclip’s Danny O’Dwyer took to social media platform BlueSky to call the technology out for producing “yassified, looks-maxed freaks.” Concept artist Jeff Talbot similarly noted that, “This is NOT the direction games should be going in. In every shot the art direction was taken away for the senseless addition of ‘details’. Each DLSS 5 shot looked worse and had less character than the original. This is just a garbage AI Filter. Lets not do this s***.”
DLSS 5 is slated to arrive on Nvidia’s RTX 50-series graphics card later this year. However, Nvidia hasn’t yet announced a release date for it yet, and the company is still working on further optimize it to run on a wider range of hardware.
