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Nvidia CEO Says He's 'Empathetic' To DLSS 5 Concerns 107

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he understands the concerns about "AI slop" with DLSS 5 but insists the feature preserves a game's underlying geometry and artistic intent. "I think their perspective makes sense, " said Huang during a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. "And I could see where they're coming from because I don't love AI slop myself. You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful... so I'm empathic toward what they're thinking. That's just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do." Tom's Hardware reports: Although Huang is striking a more conciliatory tone, much of his response is similar to what we heard at GTC [where Huang said gamers were "completely wrong."] The artist determines the geometry, we are completely truthful to the geometry... so every single frame, it enhances, but it doesn't change anything." There was some confusion about how DLSS 5 worked when it was first announced, and although the inner workings of it still aren't clear on a technical level, Huang has said that it isn't a general-purpose generative AI model. He describes it as "content-controlled generative AI." On the other end of the spectrum, Huang also said that it isn't a post-processing filter. The technical details of DLSS 5 live somewhere between that space, and we likely won't know them until later this year when the feature is set to release.

"The question about enhancing, DLSS 5... in the future, you could even prompt it. You know, I want it to be a toon shader. I want it to look like this, kind of. You could even give it an example and it would generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, the style, the intent of the artist," Huang continued. "All of that is done for the artist so they can create something that is more beautiful but still in the style that they want." Although the talking points about DLSS 5 remain unchanged, it seems that Huang has at least heard the criticism. "I think that they got the impression that the games are going to come out the way the games are... and then we're going to post-process it. That's not what DLSS is intended to do."

Huang also made assertions that DLSS is "integrated" with the artist, and suggested that it would put the power of generative AI in the hands of artists working in game development [...]. Although DLSS 5 looks like it's doing a lot, Huang said that it's just another tool, not an essential feature. "The gamers might also appreciate that, in the last couple of years, we introduced skin shaders to game developers, and many of those games have skin shaders that include sub-surface scattering that makes skin look more skin-like... [DLSS 5] is just one more tool. They can decide what to use," Huang ended the conversation about DLSS 5. Immediately after, without missing a beat, he said 1993's Doom was the most influential video game ever made.
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Nvidia CEO Says He's 'Empathetic' To DLSS 5 Concerns

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  • So it's super fancy ReShade. As long as you can turn it off, who cares?

    https://reshade.me/ [reshade.me]
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      The current fear rangers from reasonable things, like fear that it will be used to cover sloppy work same way that temporal anti-aliasing solutions are used today, to patently unreasonable things such as "AI bad" screechers.

      • I reject the sloppy work argument. Would you say the same about automated garbage collection? Memory-safe programming languages? Photoshop? A nail gun?

        Yes, it will be used to cover up mistakes (or rather, eliminate them), but so what? What isn't? What dev tool isn't there for the purpose of making a difficult, time-consuming, and error prone task easier, faster, and less error-ridden?

        You aren't fighting against AI here, you're fighting human nature.

        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          I'm fighting nothing. I'm answering the question.

          People who cannot wrap their heads around basic empathy, such as "what do other people think about this" and instead always project "you said this, therefore you must be thinking this" are so odd.

          • Then I will clarify. Your argument that it will be used to cover up sloppy work is silly. Why? Because it is true of everything. Why? Because that is human nature. We make mistakes. We get lazy. We get busy with other important things and don't have time to fix minor mistakes. Tools that help avoid, correct, or hide those mistakes are therefore useful tools and will be used as such.

            I don't think I inferred anything that was not implied in your argument. Are you taking issue with my use of the w

            • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              I will once again reiterate my previous answer, as you doubled down on "you must be thinking this if you understand this".

              The answer to your last question is "I have empathy". Top 5 percentile of population in it, measured back during my university days. I am very good at reading people's emotional state and intent and expressing it in a way that they would agree with if I want to.

              Since nerds tend to suffer from the opposite, exceedingly low empathy "I don't understand how these people could act like this",

              • Please don't try and explain empathy, I do possess it. I just don't know why you're harping on it when the issue is a lighting engine.

                I know how it feels to be the angry complaining gamer. I can look at other people's words and feel it through them. Which doesn't change the fact that the premise for their emotions is a false one. Or, a silly one, like "it'll just be used to cover up sloppy work", as if one is an expert game developer and not an armchair quarterback.

                I reject the sloppy work argument

                • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

                  Issue here is far more than any single detail such as "lighting engine". Various forms of temporal anti aliasing for example has nothing to do with it, and yet if you turn it off in quite a few modern games, you will notice a lot of really nasty shortcuts that were taken, because developers expected everything being smoothed over with temporal anti aliasing hiding the problems.

                  So your choice today is ghosting artifacts and everything smoothed over, or image with flickering, weird edges of things and so on.

      • I think it's fine if artists use generative AI like this to spruce up their graphics, as long as the end result is good. One problem is: nVidia envision this as a post-processing step, a reshader... that is only available on nVidia cards. Leaving those with Intel or AMD cards with a game that looks like crap. And I am sure nVidia can make a couple of deals with a few studios to use this tech.
        • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Same argument can be made for a lot of recent technologies, and in the end, AMD just follows nvidia.

          Think DLSS > FSR.

        • by Gleenie ( 412916 )

          As long as it requires not one, but two unobtainable 5090 cards, I think you'll find approximately 100% of gamers will be left with a game that looks like crap.

    • As long as you can turn it off, who cares?

      I'm sure at least some of the hate directed towards DLSS 5 is just sour grapes, because it will probably be a great long while before the technology trickles down to GPUs that don't require the sale of a kidney to afford.

      • I thought no this is the correct response.

        The people that whippee up something quick for a tech demo failed, but in the long run artists will be able to properly use it to make things look better.

        • by jhoegl ( 638955 )
          Yes, it is dependent on the game makers to adjust things in DLSS5 to their liking and their artist level.

          But what this demo showed was not that, it was taking "AI renderings" abusing artists art, and reshaping it to what someone else thinks is what "looks good". The overlay is not something that a game developer has control over. So, it is a concern, and it isnt that the demo failed, its that it showed bad tech usage. It showed bad technique and overlays crap as a result. It also does not fix current i
          • It was doing none of those things. It was a demo. It was dropped into existing titles to show off its capabilities, with the permission of the people who made those games. Who the hell cares if, in a tech demo, the style was altered? That's not what they were demonstrating (the devs demonstrated that before the games were released), they were demonstrating a lighting engine.

            Say someone wants to demonstrate how the rotor motor from an Apache attack helicopter can be mounted on a motorcycle frame. Woul

      • Disagree. I don't think many of the folks criticising this even heard about the hardware requirements until later. If that were the issue here we wouldn't see people rolling their eyes at the slop, they'd be lamenting their access to it. They're absolutely not doing that.

        If anything, the sentiment I saw was that this was going to be inevitably included in next gen consoles in a way that would influence the industry as a whole... but also that it reduced the authenticity of the game and... I think people und

        • Reduced the authenticity? Of a completely computer-generated image? By improving the lighting calculations?

          It was a drop-in tech demo meant to demonstrate the lighting, not the visual styles of the art directors. That will be up to the art directors who implement it. For example, Bethesda says they are going to add it to Starfield after tweaking it to match their art direction. "This is a very early look, and our art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we th

      • I'm sure at least some of the hate directed towards DLSS 5 is just sour grapes, because it will probably be a great long while before the technology trickles down to GPUs that don't require the sale of a kidney to afford.

        In the past 8 years there's literally been zero fixes for the core problems of DLSS, the artefacts and temporal instability that it causes. Why do you think there's going to be a magic fix now that the system literally re-renders the entire scene?

    • As long as you can turn it off, who cares?

      Everyone should care. The past 10 years have shown us that developers will take any shortcut they can. There's a reason visual graphics are getting *worse*, and that's because developers just don't care anymore. Who needs carefully designed lighting when you can just rely on raytracing. Fuck the people who don't want to use ray tracing, they can put up with bland graphics that look worse than what we had in 2010.
      Who needs optimisation anyway? Everyone can just turn on frame generation to magic in missing fr

      • this is the sound of the triple A side of the industry eating its own lies about itself and choking

        (you're not wrong, but I daresay most actual developers don't wanna live that life)

      • These kinds of comments always read like time and money is somehow no object.

        If they take such shortcuts then that just means your game is cheaper or it has more content elsewhere. They're not just going to sit around doing nothing while still getting paid with whatever time they saved of course.

        • These kinds of comments always read like time and money is somehow no object.

          I would agree with you if we didn't produce better looking games in the past, and if major studios weren't making FUCK YOU levels of money while producing sub tier quality games. We have very clearly gone downhill.

          There's no justifiable defense here. No we aren't living in a world where we're getting highly amazing levels of extra content as a result of these "shortcuts". None of what you say seems to be playing out in reality. Bonus points I didn't even address procedural generation which is used in a lot

          • So, DLSS5 is bad because the big studios have been going downhill? That's a non sequitur. The conclusion is unrelated to the premise. The development of DLSS5 has no impact on how the next Assassins' Creed game will be exactly the same as every preceding title.
          • Graphics quality of games has been going up and up if only because more advanced hardware that can run it keeps popping up. It's silly to say games used to look better.

        • No, as far as AAA is concerned it just means you can hire fewer and/or cheaper artists. Possibly redistributing the savings into hiring more middle managers. It certainly does not mean the game is cheaper - AAA games have not gone down in price in a long time.

          • So what? Let the big studios keep making mistakes. Why care? Don't pay $70 for crap, they'll get the idea.

            Now, think about the small studios that do innovative things and can do more and better with less time and cost.

          • That's just not how the market and competition works. If they can spend less money on it then the price of the games will go down for the simple reason that another company will start underbidding them for a similar game to get more customers and then they have no choice but to follow suit.

            The price of AAA games has been relatively consistent for a long time when accounted for inflation, but obviously each generation comes with more sophisticated graphics technology and if they couldn't use new technology t

      • That makes no sense. First off, you're missing something like six or seven decades of developers taking "any shortcut they can". Probably more. Hold a seance and ask Ada about it. And you know what? Good! Isn't the whole point of computing getting a machine to make your work faster and easier?

        Should developers be spending their limited time trying to shave a few cycles off a calculation that will be performed at 4ghz across 12 cores, or fixing the inventory system? Should they be trying to reduce

        • That makes no sense. First off, you're missing something like six or seven decades of developers taking "any shortcut they can". Probably more.

          No I'm not. I'm actively pointing out that this is the fundamental problem. Developers will take every shortcut they can and giving them DLSS will result in every game looking like trash without it, and same shaded artefacted trash with it.

          Enjoy your new world of crap visuals.

          Isn't the whole point of computing getting a machine to make your work faster and easier?

          It's even faster and easier to not release a game at all. Is that the end goal of your race to the bottom? No the goal of computing is making work *more efficient*. That implies you get the same quality output at the end which every in

          • I can't see where you're finding a problem with developers using new tools that make it easier to do their jobs. I don't know why you seem to think that makes things worse. I expect you'll also say DLSS generally is bad because it means developers don't have to spend all their time carefully coding in assembly to shave cycles on hardware that has 12 cores running at over 4ghz. That's not efficiency.

            That you're making blanket assumptions based on a brief tech demo where it was added into existing title

    • Studios will use it as a shortcut so they don't need to spend as much time doing development work and don't need to pay those filthy filthy employees. So it'll be turned on by default whether you like it or not.

      That's why you're starting to see Ray traced lighting everywhere. It requires fewer man hours to program because you can let the GPU do a bunch of the work as long as you're willing to let it tank frame rates.

      Which would be fine if games were designed for 30fps gaming like they were on the Xb
    • It really isn't, but I do wonder about how many people use reshade and complained about "artistic direction".
  • How delusional do you have to be to essentially belittle your customers like this.
    Your GPUs should not be making artistic decisions, they should just render sht the actually creative people made and designed. Nobody needs this LLM-slop, that is bringing the worst qualities of analog reproduction into the digital age: altering the original content with some super special sauce seasoning.

    • Amen!

      The the to play games is through mateix style displays showing you the math or pixel perfect sprites.

    • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      How delusional do you have to be to essentially belittle your customers like this.

      Imagine thinking gamers still matter to Huang.

    • When a lizard-brained psychopath who is physically incapable of empathy uses the word, you know it's some type of lie or manipulation.

      • What does it show about someone when they make such assumptions about people they have never even met?
        • It shows they don't need to be in the same room with someone to analyze their actions.

          • Are you observing their normal behavior, or behavior that is highly contextual and not reflective of the general? For example, if you observe an actor while they are working, you are not observing their normal behavior. People giving speeches are not engaging in their normal behavior and may not even be speaking for themselves.

            Basically, are you watching a performance or normal personal behavior? Only one of those can be used for the kind of assessment you made, and unless you know the guy personally,

            • It's telling that you compare Altman's actions with acting. That is often what he's doing, but when you don't tell someone it's an act, we have another word for that: deception. And if an actor regularly acts, that is indeed his regular behavior.

              If you want an honest, dispassionate analysis of someone, friends are exactly the ones not to consult.

    • Well, I'm sorry but I'm going to belittle you too. You're entirely wrong because you don't understand the difference between a tech demo and a released title. The GPU is not making artistic decisions, DLSS5 was dropped into existing titles to demonstrate what it can do. Who cares if it changed the artist's vision? That's not what is being demonstrated. They're demonstrating lighting. In the future, developers will use it to further their artistic direction, not replace it with whatever Nvidia wants.
  • by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Monday March 23, 2026 @07:17PM (#66057544)

    Artists are all about control. If the "inner workings of it still aren't clear on a technical level" this means that you can't predict its behavior. If you can't predict its behavior, how can you use it in any dynamic environment with certainty that it will work well as you intend? He should try to peddle it for improving workflows of VFX artists, I'm sure it will be very popular there too.

    • It's true- artists are just all about control. And fleepeds are all about speaking for other people.

      Has it occurred to you that perhaps artists aren't a homogeneous group? It should be obvious since the word itself is so fucking vague that no 2 people at random will agree on who it includes.
      • So one cannot have an understanding what's going on in a particular industry? I've worked with and talk to people in both games and film industry. My statement is derived from an understanding of artists and of pipelines. Film and game studios - they all enable artists to do their work. For example, Pixar's RenderMan, includes "non-physical" controls, which "are designed to help artists make art-directed imagery by ignoring certain laws of physics we usually simulate." (from the docs). First time I saw thi

        • First time I saw this in a paper. So, yeah, "artists", and you also seem to have no clue.

          And you seem to have an elementary grasp of logic.

          That an artist may want that proves my point, not yours.
          Artists are not a homogeneous group. Some may want to bend the laws of physics. Others will be steadfastly against it.br. There is no amount of mental gymnastics you can execute to make your statement less ridiculous.

          • Some may want to bend the laws of physics. Others will be steadfastly against it.

            And *all* would like their work to appear as *they* intended. It's not hard to grasp. Point me to one artist (who is not a burnt out husk) that would say "sure I don't care about the skin texture I labored to hard to make fucking pores and wrinkles for, just turn DLSS so you can see it better, as NVIDIA knows best". Give it a rest.

            • Bullshit. You're trying the mental gymnastics. I tried to gently tell you it was just going to make you look stupid.
              You said:

              And *all* would like their work to appear as *they* intended.

              Which of course, no one ever denied. This is called a straw man.

              It's not hard to grasp. Point me to one artist (who is not a burnt out husk) that would say "sure I don't care about the skin texture I labored to hard to make fucking pores and wrinkles for, just turn DLSS so you can see it better, as NVIDIA knows best". Give it a rest.

              And this is you beating that straw man to a pulp.

              All I need to do is point to one artist who judged his work by what the output of the model was, no differently than a complex filter in photoshop, which they also have no fucking clue what its technical details are, but a pretty fine grasp of what its non-technical deta

              • You misunderstand, either on purpose or because you can't read. Photoshop, and genAI can be used while authoring, yes. To get the look one wishes, as part of the creative process. DLSS is runtime working ON THE RESULTS of their work. It's like working first, making your artistic decision, and then passing it over to the AI to make its own judgement and interpretation. Just no.

              • All I need to do is point to one artist who judged his work by what the output of the model was, no differently than a complex filter in photoshop, which they also have no fucking clue what its technical details are, but a pretty fine grasp of what its non-technical details are- almost precisely analogous to how they'll use model-generated/augmented art.

                It's not really the same. With the photoshop filter the artist can choose which filter they want to use, apply it, check whether they like the end result, go back to the original if they don't, apply a different filter on top of that if it's not quite right, tweak the results of the filter by hand, etc etc and only after all that if they're completely satisfied with the end result it will go into the actual game binaries. Certain textures may benefit from one type of filters while others need another type o

  • by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Monday March 23, 2026 @07:30PM (#66057558)

    "I don't love AI slop myself" says the biggest contributor to the generation of AI slop.

  • How about graphics card prices? Is he empathetic to those?

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday March 23, 2026 @08:15PM (#66057656)

    DLSS 5 isn't a shader, it's an image fuckaround, and one that isn't temporally stable either. I originally skipped the FIFA example they demonstrated (because I hate the game and EA), but holy shit DLSS 5 fundamentally can't handle moving scenes at all. Originally the only motion I saw was in Starfield's outdoor scene and I noted in the previous article how shadows and ambient occlusion are now completely unstable which was distracting as all hell, but now that I've seen the FIFA demo,... oooh boy.

    - During the goal celebration the player's shirt goes unstable with DLSS on looking like 10 chest bursters were trying to work their way out of his body. https://www.reddit.com/r/EASpo... [reddit.com] like seriously these were moving like crazy and weren't part of the original image, nor was the moire artefacts.
    - During the kick the player's seems to yeet the ball through an alternate dimension with DLSS turned on. Please all you "it looks better" people, TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK LOOKS BETTER HERE: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmas... [reddit.com]
    - No seriously, tell me how much your specular highlights are important to you when the game starts refusing to render basic elements properly https://www.extremetech.com/ga... [extremetech.com]
    - I mean yeah subsurface scattering is faked now for devs who were too slack to do the job properly, but is that visual treat really worth DLSS changing a characters haircut ... ONLY ON ONE HALF OF THE HEAD? https://cdn.videocardz.com/1/2... [videocardz.com]

    It's like Microsoft complained about being called Microslop, and NVIDIA said... hold my beer.

    This isn't a shader. It's a really poorly created AI image creator that required TWO RTX5090s to run in the demo. Congrats you can pay $4000USD for the privilege of your games looking like AI slop. That's what this is really about. Open your wallet paybitch!

    Can't wait for the first DLSS 5 example to revert us back to not being able to count fingers on hands anymore. I've never seen a more rubbish product.

    • There's this Disney video game my partner loves playing and it has absolutely horrible issues with clipping. They recently added horseback riding as a game mechanic, and the horse clips through damn near everything. That's pretty much where the bar is right now for graphical accuracy in games, so I'm not entirely sure that a bit of AI introduced graphical glitches are a total dealbreaker.

      Needing $4k worth of GPUs though? Yeah, that part's not gonna fly.

    • by vyvepe ( 809573 )
      Mod UP!
  • Intel... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Temkin ( 112574 ) on Monday March 23, 2026 @08:42PM (#66057722)

    I'm about done with NVIDIA. Here's to hoping Intel improves their Linux driver support... They step up their game, and I could be convinced to switch. But right now.... It's all crap.

    T

    • So you're only about 95% done with NVIDIA, since they own 5% of Intel? That should tell you everything you need to know about the market. Even Trump admits NVIDIA has a monopoly, and he said so with Lisa Su sitting next to him.

    • If you're using Linux then there is absolutely no reason to choose Intel over AMD for graphics, and lots of reasons to do the opposite. The OSS AMD driver is excellent. I have several graphics-related problems on my main desktop with Nvidia graphics, and none on my AMD MiniPC.

    • Dude. We are in free fall. This is the end game. Nothing will ever get better until total and complete collapse of society as a whole worldwide. You can thank Europeans that have not had to deal with Reality in 2 thousand years for this result.

      • You can thank Europeans that have not had to deal with Reality in 2 thousand years for this result.

        They had about as much reality as they could eat just last century and still learned nothing.

  • by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Monday March 23, 2026 @09:20PM (#66057800)
    it's been a neverending stream of blatant lies out of Nvidia around this, the kind that spells "easy lawsuit" when the bubble pops. Someone finally got through the PR machine at Nvidia to find this thing is nothing more than a slop filter pasted over video games. All the stuff about "materials and lighting" and artist input and etc. are easily provable lies. The demo itself is basically a lie, 5 second clips without camera movement because if the camera does move stuff can start warping around randomly. That's the point we've reached in the hype bubble, when even the biggest companies feel free to spout nonsense, legally actionable lies to keep the hype going then the collapse is probably within a year.
    • I almost believed it until I saw the FIFA footage with the ball disappearing and re-appearing and smearing all over the place. It's clearly not aware of wireframes and in-game objects.

    • "All the stuff about "materials and lighting" and artist input and etc. are easily provable lies."

      Then please demonstrate the ease of proof by proving your claims.

  • Someone who knows what "empathetic" means.

  • It's really nice to have what is basically the world's most awesome anti-aliasing / magical magnification application there is.

    The problem is that you cannot extract more information than there was in the source data, so when you add detail you are literally adding it (not recovering it). When AI adds detail, it can do some amazing things... but it can also hallucinate or average things towards a blend of its relevant training data.

    It's a cheap shortcut that is unnecessary for most people and for the peopl

  • Do better next time.

  • by ledow ( 319597 ) on Tuesday March 24, 2026 @04:52AM (#66058176) Homepage

    "You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful..."

    Yeah, you and I are not on the same page.

  • Frame gen was stupid. This is somehow even worse. Who are Nvidia building these products, that gamers DO NOT want, for??

    • I'm a gamer, I want them, so speak for yourself. The occasional frame gen artifact is better than low frame rates. I frikkin love it. I frikkin love DLSS. It makes things look better while also running faster. I'm ready to believe there is a magic elf living in my GPU.
  • Surely he can change wardrobe once in a while?

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