Nvidia announces an AI filter for games, and gamers go wild

Something funny happened in the world of video games.

Nvidia realized that its graphics chips are also good for gaming, not just AI, and announced a technology called DLSS 5 that uses their power to, in the company’s words, “infuse pixels with photoreal lighting and materials to bridge the gap between rendering and reality.” With generative AI, obviously.

The public reaction was quite negative, even on Nvidia’s official YouTube video. DLSS 5 kind of turns the look of games into AI-generated videos. More photorealistic than the original, yes, but the criticism is that the technology interferes with the art of games.

The DLSS 5-on graphics do indeed look like AI-generated videos, or those artificial filters on Instagram and TikTok, but it’s not as if the originals, without the effect, were much better. That intrigued me a bit more than DLSS 5 itself. I haven’t played video games in ages, and these PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X graphics don’t seem all that different from what I remember of video games from two or three generations ago. Given that, I think I prefer Nvidia’s AI-filtered version…?

This article from Gizmodo has some comparisons and videos.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was unfazed by the widespread criticism. During a Q&A session at Nvidia GTC, the company’s AI-focused event, when asked by a reporter, Jensen began his response saying that “Well, first of all, they [critics] are completely wrong” (video).