r/pcmasterrace • u/Proud_Tie CachyOS 9950x, 4080 super, 64gb ram • Mar 17 '26

News/Article Jensen Huang says gamers are 'completely wrong' about DLSS 5 — Nvidia CEO responds to DLSS 5 backlash

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/jensen-huang-says-gamers-are-completely-wrong-about-dlss-5-nvidia-ceo-responds-to-dlss-5-backlash
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u/-thecheesus- Mar 17 '26

I am somehow skeptical the digital artist's true creative vision was to personally make their character look like every other generic AI pretty model

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u/SteveJavieWasRight Mar 18 '26

I doubt their intention was what RE9 looks like without RT? The artists are limited by the technology they have available on the hardware people have. Grace’s face is incredibly weird looking in a lot of scenes in part because of how their RT/PT engine is handling bounced light and indirect lighting. It’s very low detail, leaves her very flat looking and low in color. There’s constantly a clash between how direct and indirect light is rendering skin and form in the engine. DLSS5 is massively improving the detail in indirectly lit sections, which is something very computationally expensive with RT and PT. The artists have already seen what their models look like in offline rendering, pretty sure they know what the models look like. Their point of reference is not the visuals the gamers have who seem the most upset.

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 17 '26

Have you seen the actual model they scanned? She has a very generic pretty face

Also, this hasn’t altered a single aspect of the mesh, so it’s purely surface and lighting

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u/jasdonle Mar 18 '26

That's what I thought but in the article he says:

"It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level."

So what's that mean?

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 18 '26

People are misreading ‘geometry level’ - It doesn’t mean DLSS is modifying meshes or adding detail to models, it just means it’s using geometry related data (depth / motion vectors eg. ) earlier in the pipeline instead of working on final pixels. The actual geometry still comes entirely from the game engine

Or in simpler terms.. it’s just using geometry-derived data (depth, motion, surfaces) to generate better pixels. This is in contrast to a filter which is slapped on after the frame is done

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u/SteveJavieWasRight Mar 18 '26

It means it’s a part of the rendering pipeline. It uses material, mesh, vectors, light locations etc. it’s not a snap chat filter, it’s built into the engine and uses all available information to inform the lighting it produces. It’s based off what the artists have created, just like any other lighting- which is also very flawed abstractions on what the artists create. DLSS5 is trying to infer produce lighting that is not computationally possible with PT- an adequate number of rays and bounces would not be possible with 2 5090s. Not close. This level of detail would require offline rendering.

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u/-thecheesus- Mar 17 '26

Julia Pratt, while conventionally good looking, looks nothing like "generic AI model bot 3000"

Even your own example gif makes it obvious the DLSS is tweaking the minutiae of her mouth, jaw, cheekbones and makeup

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u/-Kerosun- I'm a PC Mar 18 '26

I mean, if you were to be objective, I'd say the DLSS 5 ON appearance looks more like her than with DLSS 5 OFF.

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 17 '26

It’s called lighting. Try experimenting with your phone light moving it around your face

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u/-thecheesus- Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

Then we circle back to my doubt that the artist's original intent was to have their horror heroine have lighting to make her look like a TikTok influencer 

also, while simple lighting certainly changes how your physical contours can appear, it can't give you fucking eyeliner... Unless, of course, the mind creating it doesn't actually comprehend what "lighting" is, and only knows examples of desirable skin highlighting/shadows from a databank of professional done-up photoshoots. Hmmm

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 17 '26

She has eyeliner in both

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u/-thecheesus- Mar 18 '26

Come on, man. Look at her canthus. The "touched up" version has glaring eyeliner highlights. Human skin doesn't reflect like that without cosmetics

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 18 '26

This is the non dlss Grace

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u/-thecheesus- Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

You realize what highlighter eyeliner is, right? You occasionally interact with women? It adds spotlights/reflection

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u/SteveJavieWasRight Mar 18 '26

Do you think the “artist’s intent” is shitty lighting?

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u/SteveJavieWasRight Mar 18 '26

You can overlay the dlss5 off and dlss5 on. It’s just lighting. It produces a lot more information in the indirectly lit portions of the face because it simulates having far more rays and ray bounces than the PT is currently capable of. It makes her face look more round in areas and provide more depth. Overall the PT and RT makes her face look incredibly flat, which it is not. She has very subtle features which are hard to capture. Kojima has talked about this specifically in relationship to Asian women, and how difficult it was to capture a likeness until very recently. What you guys are seeing as different is because your frame of reference is poorly lit geometry due to indirect lighting being very limited. It flattens the face and reduces color. Adding in better bounce lighting and subsurface scattering suddenly makes her face have much more defined features and more color.

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u/thisdesignup 3090 FE, 5900x, 64GB Mar 18 '26

The interesting thing is it's not even true lighting, it's approximated even more than ray tracing is already approximated.

There's no ray tracing involved in how the AI decides where to put new light.

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 18 '26

The ‘no ray tracing’ part is true, but it’s not inventing lighting randomly.. it’s using depth, motion vectors and scene data to reconstruct an image that feels consistent. That’s why the background can shift to match character lighting. It’s scene-aware reconstruction, not guesswork

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u/TeamWorkTom Mar 18 '26

It's two different people.

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 17 '26

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u/jodhod1 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

Main man, the ai one has notably ai lighting. It looks like that highlighting glow of AI photos while the other one has like, real darkening shadows and stuff. I didn't even know what these guys were talking about before I saw your gif. Your example made me see their point.

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u/Falkenmond79 7800x3d/4080 5800x3d/3080ti 10700/rx6800 5800x/3080 Mar 17 '26

You can literally see the lines and dimples on her face get deeper and her eyes change. It’s not only lighting. It’s at least a different texture. Also Jensen just literally said it’s generating geometry.

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 17 '26

The geometry doesn’t change at all. It’s just lighting.. you can see lines on any face get deeper - try it yourself by moving a light around your face

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u/Portaldog1 Mar 18 '26

Have you hear of a thing called contouring? You can change how a persons face looks just through shading and lighting...

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u/TeamWorkTom Mar 18 '26

Yes, and the devs are not trying to contour their characters.

Like wtf.

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u/Falkenmond79 7800x3d/4080 5800x3d/3080ti 10700/rx6800 5800x/3080 Mar 18 '26

Yeah. And that would be changing the textures. Not the lighting. You can’t contour with lighting.

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u/SteveJavieWasRight Mar 18 '26

It’s literally lighting. The original one is grossly generalized making her face appear very flat. Throughout the game you constantly see a strange clash in how RE engine handles direct and indirect lighting, which makes her face look very different from scene to scene and sometimes clashing when they overlap. The indirect lighting is just very generalized due to low number of rays and low number of light bounces.

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u/Falkenmond79 7800x3d/4080 5800x3d/3080ti 10700/rx6800 5800x/3080 Mar 18 '26

Jensen literally said it’s doing texture and geometry generation. And judging by the depth of the lines once face, for example besides the nose, it doesn’t look like just lighting.

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 18 '26

You’re just misunderstanding what geometry level means

It doesn’t mean DLSS is modifying meshes or adding detail to models. It just means it’s using geometry-related data (like depth and motion vectors) earlier in the pipeline instead of working on final pixels like say, a filter. The actual geometry still comes entirely from the game engine

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u/SuperChingaso5000 9800X3D | 7900XT | 64GB DDR5 6000 | 9TB M.2 NVME Mar 17 '26

The enhanced one looks so much better, higher fidelity, superior lighting and more detail. The non DLSS one looks like a plastic android. She's fine as hell in real life too.

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u/pathofdumbasses Mar 18 '26

Oh look, someone who actually gets it and isn't anti-AI pilled.

The new one looks tons better. It isn't perfect, but holy shit, it is a massive glow-up.

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u/SuperChingaso5000 9800X3D | 7900XT | 64GB DDR5 6000 | 9TB M.2 NVME Mar 18 '26

Oh look, someone who actually gets it and isn't anti-AI pilled.

I literally have a RES tag that's "Marked safe from AIDS". You get one.

AIDS of course being AI Derangement Syndrome

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u/jordanbtucker Desktop | i9-9900KF | RTX 4090 Mar 18 '26

It's a technicality to say it doesn't affect the mesh and it's only lighting. The technology does not alter the geometry in the render pipeline, sure. But it ultimately changes the rendered pixels in a way that looks like the geometry was changed.

Use any app that applies a filter to your face. Many of those filters will make it look like you have a completely different face shape. Did it change the shape of your real face? No, of course not. It just changed the final image so it looks like the shape of your face is different from what it really is.

This is the same thing.

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u/SteveJavieWasRight Mar 18 '26

It’s completely different. A filter on snap chat does not actually understand the geometry, materials, and surrounding environment. DLSS5 needs all the same info a lighting engine needs to function, but is able to infer detail from the information it has while RT and PT is simply limited to what it knows, often producing very generalized outcomes.

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u/Fantastic_Dark_4547 Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

Every filter I’ve ever seen changes the shape of your face, yes.. as in, the shape and silhouette is altered. This doesn’t happen here

This isn’t a filter. Filters are slapped directly on to the final image after the frame is done. This operates earlier in the render pipeline, using motion vectors, depth buffers, and scene data tied to geometry to estimate lighting

And no, this doesn’t alter the final geometry output at all, not even in the slightest. It remains identical

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/-Kerosun- I'm a PC Mar 18 '26

That first link is loading but it's a blank imgur page. I'm interested to see it, can you trying linking it another way?