I’m completely speechless. This looks so terrible I thought it was a joke, but apparently Nvidia released these demos to impress people. DLSS 5 runs the entire game through an AI filter, making every character look like it’s running through an ultra realistic beauty filter.
The photo above is used as the promo image for the official blog post by the way. It completely ignores artistic intent and makes Grace’s face look “sexier” because apparently that’s what realism looks like now.
I wouldn’t be so baffled if this was some experimental setting they were testing, but they’re advertising this as the next gen DLSS. As in, this is their image of what the future of gaming should be. A massive F U to every artist in the industry. Well done, Nvidia.
Look closely at the images, what do you notice about the face?
Darker eyebrows, more pronounced eye bags, deeper red, more pronounced, and slightly more cracked lips, and accented shading and slight tweaks to facial shape to fit more traditional beauty standards.
It’s not just making it “more realistic”, it’s passing the artist’s original intent through a filter that actually changes the way the character looks. Using the traits I described earlier, you could assume different things about the character than was intended. Darker and larger eye bags could imply worse sleep. The cracked lips could signify worse health, but the color could imply better health. The shape and shading on her face overall also changes how attractive and average/unaverage she’s expected to appear in terms of looks.
Plus, when you think about how this is applied, it’s not just some static application to a character model. It’s effectively a full filter over your game. These traits could all change by the second as lighting or angle changes even slightly, which only makes it harder to determine the actual intended state and appearance of characters or an environment.
Things like this are visible in other images from the article, too.
For example, the older woman holding a wand. the wrinkles on her face darken and become so much more visible that you could be forgiven for thinking it was meant to be her like 5 or 10 years later, and on the image after that in the compare tool, the lighting on the dude’s face entirely changes to make him more front-lit.
This is fundamentally altering the way things look from the intent of the artists and developers.