“At this rate, why make game art at all?”: Nvidia DLSS 5 demands a sale damaging and stock tanking fightback, argues New Blood boss

Players and developers should boycott Nvidia’s AI-stuffed DLSS 5 tech, with hopes that it’ll force the compny to “think about going back to giving us what we want”. That’s the appeal being made by Dave Oshry, CEO of indie studio New Blood Interactive, who’s been asked for his take on the neural rendering gubbins Nvidia exec Jensen Huang’s recently been adopting a multitude of tones as he’s tried to convince critis that they’ve just got it all wrong.

Speaking to PC Gamer in comments the pair have since posted in full to social media Oshry and Dusk developer David Szymanski argued that DLSS 5 isn’t just an optional trick folks can ignore, but something that should actively resisted.

“Please tell me what generative AI has anything to do with Deep Learning Super Sampling – which is what DLSS actually stands for in case anyone forgot,” Oshry said. “They’re hiding this Gen AI bullshit behind the DLSS moniker because they think we’re stupid…They know if they called it something like ‘Nvidia Generative Upscaling’ the public backlash would be immediate and intense.”

“The only thing we can do besides calling them out on it and making them feel bad is voting with our wallets,” he continued. “Cripple their sales, tank their stock price. Stop collaborating with them as developers. Then maybe they’ll think about going back to giving us what we want. In the developer’s eyes, DLSS 5 amounts to “fundamentally changing the way video games look based on artificial intelligence that’s been trained on Instagram models and Epstein memes”, leading him to question the point of making game art in the first place.

“Even if we set aside all (relevant and valid) concerns about artistic intent and generative AI itself, the lighting and contrast it adds (or removes, in some parts) makes scenes look less realistic and believable,” Szymanski added, noting that he can only see the tech being “optional like any number of ‘optional’ features that anyone who has played a AAA game in the past half decade can tell you aren’t really optional, because games are now built to lean on those technologies”.

The pair’s full quotes also see them opine as to whether a number of other technologies Nvidia have touted over the years, from pillar-exploding PhysX to path tracing, actually were substantive long-term advancements. In the case of a lot of the company’s latest graphical enhancements that’ve been big selling points of DLSS generations prior to this latest one, their views seem to trend towards a yes, but with the key caveat that this comes at a cost. Szymanski specified that when it comes to DLSS up to now, temporal anti-aliasing, and ray tracing, the “immense” cost is in terms of “clarity, accessibility, and playability” of games that lean heavily on them.

DLSS 5 isn’t set to arrive until later this year, and it’ll be interesting to see how much pushback Nvidia face from within game development spheres themselves, given the likes of Bethesda and Capcom who volunteered for the tech’s initial reveal have now seen just how controversial it is. They may plow on regardless and push their staff to do so, but this time there’ll be no ‘oh, we didn’t know you felt this way’ or ‘you’ll see, it’s different’ to hide behind.