Jensen Huang, CEO of tech giant NVIDIA, has responded to the sizeable online backlash that has emerged in the wake of the reveal of the company’s DLSS 5 upscaling technology yesterday.
The reveal trailer showcased multiple games using the new technology, which goes beyond simple upscaling and leads to majorly revised visual appearances to games – especially character faces – in a way that has drawn comparisons to AI slop.
It has also resulted in complaints about altering artistic intent. A reinterpretation of a game’s art direction is not something expected from a performance enhancer. At a press Q&A at GTC 2026, Huang downplayed the criticism, telling Tom’s Hardware:
“Well, first of all, they’re completely wrong. The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses the controllability of 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. All of that is in the control – direct control – of the game developer… This is very different [from] generative AI; it’s content-control generative AI. That’s why we call it neural rendering.”
Bethesda, which showed off some of “Starfield” working with the new tech in the video NVIDIA released, now tells Eurogamer that there is “further adjusting the lighting and final effect” of the tech to be done on “Starfield,” and adds: “This will all be under our artists’ control, and totally optional for players.”
Scepticism around the tech remains high, with plenty of memes still circling and all of the fuss making the tech a tougher sell when it launches this Fall.
