When Nvidia unveiled its new DLSS 5 feature, which uses AI to overhaul the visuals of video games, gamers knew what they were getting into.
The official demos Nvidia had shared previously looked uncanny, disjointed from the game’s original aesthetic, and worst of all, bore that unmistakable AI sheen. Gamers reviled it as “slop tracing” — a play on Nvidia’s ray tracing graphics tech — and it spurred so much backlash that even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who nowadays is usually too busy hyping the AI boom to pay attention to the company’s gaming roots, got dragged into defending it.
Now, adding to Nvidia’s woes, an unfinished version of the upcoming feature was accidentally leaked, and modders have jumped on the opportunity to see just how bad it can get. The results have been horrors far beyond what anyone could’ve anticipated.
One viral video shows a cutscene from the classic 2001 title Halo: Combat Evolved. With the bootleg DLSS 5 enabled, it looks less like it’s been injected with cutting edge tech and more like it’s been put through fourteen different stages of compression to make a deep fried meme. The colors are blotchy, bordering on cheap HDR, and faces are rendered in disturbingly hyperrealistic detail. Bringing back the magic of how these old games look in your childhood, right?
That’s how it looks with the settings cranked up to the max. But as that tester opined, “even in the BEST circumstances it takes out everything and makes it look incredibly generic.”
Nvidia’s AI feature also, apparently, absolutely tanks your frame rate.
The Verge spotted one user who tried running it on the 2024 game Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and said their frames per second were cut in half. Another who tried slapping it on GTA V saw their frames drop from 90 to 29 frames per second.
A particularly egregious DLSS abomination making the rounds shows the iconic Final Fantasy character Cloud Strife — or at least what’s supposed to be Cloud Strife, since it looks more like someone cosplaying as him with a heavy helping of makeup. In other words, Cloud was “yassified.”
To be clear, this isn’t an official release of DLSS 5, and many examples we’re seeing are pushing it to its absurd extreme.
Still, it illustrates just how drastically the AI tech can trample a game’s original aesthetic, replacing it with something cheap and gaudy. It also stands in stark contrast to how it was originally hyped up. After DLSS was announced in March, Huang hailed it as gaming’s “GPT moment for graphics.” He sounded less evangelical, though, as the backlash didn’t die down, claiming to also hate “AI slop” while insisting that DLSS 5 was doing something different.
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