The one great thing about DLSS 5 is it’s going to help people realize art direction is what mattered more this entire time. Not resolution and ultra-realism.
To add to this, stylized art with good direction is timeless, doesn't require cutting edge tech, and is a lot more memorable than realistic art with mediocre direction.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a great example. That game is entirely monochrome (not grayscale; literally only “on” or “off”) and looks amazing because of the care put in to make that style work.
They literally developed new rendering techniques to get the dithering to look just so. It's a poster child of how you don't need crazy poly counts or hyper-realism to make something look amazing.
Love his work, and I hope to see many more in the future.
Dude feels like the U.M.A.M.I of gaming, doing his own thing, but with the heart at the right place and if you like the ride, you are up for a good time!
EXTREMELY fun game. If you like pretending you're a detective, it's an absolute blast. I recommend buying a small notebook because you'll want to take notes while playing, and physically writing it down — while eliminating the need to alt+tab out of the game — also just feels appropriate.
Obra Dinn is a game I use to quickly explain to people what actually makes a game great. Everything about it is done exceptionally well even though it's a fairly straightforward game in monochrome from one guy. But you can tell that time and care went into every aspect.
This is what kept me hooked on WoW for years, it had this consistent charm to it's art style that aged very well even as the blocky graphics were totally outpaced by other games coming out.
Wind Waker is an art style that has aged so well. I hated it when I was in grade school when it was first announced bc I wanted "gritty realism," but now older I appreciate its beauty
I read an article about how Valve payed special attention to the silhouettes, as that was one of the main ways players would identify opponents in a chaotic environment.
Making them clear and identifiable is pretty much the opposite of camo, but makes for better gameplay.
Silhouette design has long been a fundamental thing in character design in animation and even comic art. Think of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck or Asterix and Obelix and many others.. iconic shapes.
Valve honestly does such a good job on making it so you can identify characters easily. The special infected in L4D are another shining example. Even in the middle of a hoard you can identify the special infected by sound and silhouette
You can do that with realistic graphics as well, look at Battlefield 1, where each class is immediately identifiable regardless of faction (scouts have a cape or flowing coat, medics have the crutches, support has a large backpack, and assault is just a normal looking soldier)
You can also do this with realism. If the art direction is on point. Battlefield 3 is a PS3 game with low quality assets that theoretically should look like shit but it has impeccable design and carefully chosen lighting that wipes the floor with most Battlefields besides BF1
Good graphics isn’t the same as hyperrealistic. You can have good graphics with all sorts of creative design.
Games should be fun, but they’re also a visual medium, and as such they should also leverage the visual possibilities. Hyperrealism however is one of the most boring ways to do it.
I still think that the Wind Waker is the nicest looking Zelda game of all time.
The cel shading look is sick as fuck and that game looks exactly like the artists behind it intended. None of it looks realistic, but it looks great and cohesive nonetheless.
I agree. My dream aesthetic ever since I started playing games in the late 80s was "playable Saturday morning cartoon". Wind Waker was the first game that truly nailed what I had imagined was eventually possible.
There's a reason that after Van Gogh mastered hyperealism, he ventured into abstract art. Realism is a valid art direction, but it's not the end-all be-all of art. Some - arguably most - games would not benefit, and would be actively hindered, by realism.
If you look at Mc Escher's paintings you can tell he also had mastered realism before going on to make pieces in his signature style. Granted a lot of his mind bending art still uses aspects of realism with the shading especially
With Escher I think that the realistic minutiae serve to make the mind-bending geometry stand out even more. Like it's uncanny to have beautiful, realistic shading coming from multiple directions and landing on differently impossibly oriented surfaces. It would be disorienting if it weren't so well executed.
I get your point, but Van Gogh never painted in a 'hyper realistic' style. He was always to a degree impressionistic, later moving on to post impressionism.
A better example of someone more grounded in classical realism who evolved pretty far afield from that is Dali or Picasso maybe.
Fair! I'm not gonna pretend to be an art expert or anything, he was just the first person I thought of. From a casual admirer, I find that in a lot of Van Gogh's early works his landscapes look like landscapes, his animals like animals, and his people like people, whereas his later works get pretty crazy.
And games that go for hyper-realism are the ones that don't graphically age well. The original Luigi's Mansion still holds up 25 years later but there are games 15 years younger that were impressive for the time but are hard to play now because they look dated
Feels like gamers have been beating the “realism is overrated” drum since the gamecube era and yet companies still push for more ”realistic” graphics every year. Guess its easier to show stockholders that your products have more polygons than it is to show that your game is more fun to play.
The issue isn't more polygons for shareholders. It's the increasing mainstream acceptance by lowest common denominator normal people. These aren't the people having discussions on reddit about video games, these are the people that play 20 minutes of Madden 2-3 nights a week and never touch anything else, but they are first in line for a ps6 and the newest version of Madden.
They vastly spend more than me and you (in their combined numbers) with needing a fraction of the work to entertain, and their only concern they care for is hyper realism because they don't understand and engage with the medium beyond the barest surface level.
You say this as if 90% of gamers really dont give a shit and just want their games to look as "good" as possible, or wanting to use the latest and greatest tech. They'll turn on dlss 5 because 5 is bigger than 4.
DLSS5 is going to come out and be used by millions of people for 5 years and then the internet will be flooded with "every game looks the same" posts by people who genuinely dont see how dlss5 ruins art direction.
90% of gamers probably won't have access to DLSS5-capable tech for a long time
In a dystopian future where games are only playable via remote streaming, it's possible that you could pay for more powerful servers, but I hope that doesn't come to pass
I saw someone use it on god of war. Because the ai filter is focusing on realism, it assumes kratos’s white skin is because of poor lighting. So it corrects him and makes kratos have darker browner skin.
I can’t tell you how much of a spit in the face to art that is.
Well duh. We are throwing DLSS5 into games that weren't designed to have it.
That compared to a game where the artists from the start work together to produce something greater than either would do alone. If you design your product to use the product properly, your results will be better than throwing it into old games and expecting perfect reproduction.
That's what I've been thinking. Am I crazy to just want developers and artists to do their thing and not have ai modifying it? It seems completely ridiculous.
This is why people love GTA and don’t even know it. It’s not a hyper photorealistic game but it nails certain aspects of life realistically. For me it’s the art direction in GTA that makes it so great. Other games can have photo realism and never be nearly as good.
Speaking as someone who has worked professionally in "the biz" as a character artist for thirty years, I can't upvote this enough. Well said pal, well said.
Id like to think that, but I honestly believe the more general audience who doesnt know much about anything is gonna be eating from the trough all the same
Exactly. I've been seeing the "realistic" overcast mod for awhile. Overcast DOES allow for an easier time making things look real, but it doesn't always work and this that we're seeing is an amalgamation of different mods, and not just DLSS 5
I've recently come to think that I do have a problem with the realism part as well. Videogame graphics / sound isn't as "noisy" as "real-life experience", which can make doing something inside a VG be more comfortable than doing a similar activity IRL.
On the other hand, the epidemic of shitty writing and shitty VG AI (NPCs, cars, enemies) is a dealbreaker.
I think I know exactly what you mean. Dishonored 2 was harder for me to get into than Dishonored one, as well as Deus Ex, DE: Human revolution compared to Mankind Divided.
In both the sequels the scenes were hard to instantly read, and interactables were lost in all the noise
Yeah I've seen quite a few screenshots and videos and none of them even look remotely like this. It legit looks like an amateur attempt at gaussian splatting (so the shit I got from my shitty phone camera and 3050 on PostShot before it went subscription based)
It actually looks more like they're doing multiple passes of DLSS5. I tried it yesterday in several games doing 3 passes and it makes everything look like this.
For those who don't know, this is what going from off to 3 passes looks like in Gallipoli. Sorry it's not a screenshot, these were quick photos from my phone.
This is why OPs video looks weird, and those images circulating of the anime game that make the whole thing look like a freak show. If you use the tech as intended and adjust the settings accordingly, then you can make the game look great. Unfortunately those who hate blindly will use the worst images possible to do what they always do.
Im like. So weirded out by everything going on here. Its not just grandmas, its EVERYONE.
People just read a headline and look at a picture and instantly believe it, and start responding why its bad that this thing that isnt happening is happening. Gunga. We need to go back to cave time.
Things go viral first on twitter because twitter pays out real money for posts that get big views, which incentivises people to try and make viral content usually by exaggerating and jumping on divisive trends. Then the karma farmers on reddit take the viral posts from twitter and post them on reddit, so they can build karma on accounts in order to sell them (accounts with high enough post karma can be sold for over $3000 as many of the biggest subreddits have karma limits on new posts, and advertisers want accounts that can make posts). Then hundreds of thousands of bots across reddit upvote and comment on the posts, which gives both human users and reddit's investors the impression that the site is constantly full of activity.
That explains the terrible "blur" every time they move. It's not even motion blur, it's just a mush of rendering trying to figure out what color the pixel is.
Yup! This isn't the case on the first pass, which to me looks great if adjusted correctly. Obviously it's up to personal preference, but here's some footage I got in Gallipoli with one pass.
Brother I'm trying to show that OPs video was deep fried by multiple passes. Nobody should be playing above the first pass, it starts messing as it's no longer getting direct data from the motion vectors.
Why the heck does it look so off and realistic at the same time. But not realistic in a good way
Edit: Wow the engagement on this post is insane, I wasn't expecting this, well done people!
So what, we'll eventually get to a point where the player never actually sees the game and just some video a piece of software spat out imagining what the game would be if it was something else?
With the prices of new hardware, we'll reach a point when we'll imagine we are playing the games, instead. Maximum immersion, we got back to books, lol.
Worse, it plunges you straight into the Uncanny Valley. Every instinct we have is suddenly screaming at us that this this isn't human, and is probably dangerous.
Also, if I wanted to see dilapidated scenery and homeless encampments with drug addicts, I’d just go outside…
Not everything needs to be hyper realistic, this just looks like that shitty depressing part of town you normally try to avoid
The uncanny valley is a psychological reaction where things that look almost human—but not quite right—make people feel unsettled, creeped out, or scared.
DLSS5 gives characters photorealistic faces... but these characters are not fully realistic due to movement and other things.
They are almost like actual humans, and that feels offputing.
Isn't this really targeted for 60xx series? Like 20xx introduced raytracing but wasn't worth it, and dlss 5 is introduced in 50xx series but isn't worth it.
Not something I'm going to pay 5k for however, but not sure anything Nvidia gaming feature is worth 5k.
Every time someone shows off their ultra-realistic reshade mod for any game, the go-to look is uniformly gray overcast sky plus wet pavement because that's the easiest lighting condition to imitate.
This is the main problem with realism in video games. Realism is an asymptote which means a game can get close to realism but because it’s artificial it will always feel off. It’s pretty much creates the uncanny valley where it looks real but little things make it seem just off. It’s why older games that aimed for realism didn’t age well because we can immediately see the artificial parts more clearly.
Because they basically filtered out all the artistic choices and lighting. Realism is boring and easier to break immersion, so the tiniest thing will draw focus.
Why the heck does it look so off and realistic at the same time.
That's the AI image gen in a nutshell. Artists screeched when it first came out not out of fear for our livelihoods (thought that was there, yet another excuse for the capitalists to enact layoffs), but out of the awfulness of everything in it. Trained eyes would see all the mistakes and errors that's akin to an eldritch abomination (eg: double or more horizons; incoherent lighting; etc).
Because its a mod injected from another game. I'm not saying DLSS 5 is great but you all look dumb as shit acting like this is official implementation.
Right? It's one of those "hyperrealism" mods where the goal is kind of specifically to make it feel less like a videogame. They're usually pretty impressive, but "preserving the artist's intent" isn't the goal of such mods.
It actually makes them an especially good and uncontroversial use case for DLSS-5.
I know it’s just one screenshot but I’m honestly not seeing the difference here. PT already looks amazing on this game, not sure DLSS 5 is worth losing 50% of your frames for here.
It's a screenshot so we would have to see on video, wouldn't expect a huge difference though although it's probably cheaper than PT so that might be the advantage.
Edit: some faces look awful, but I didn't expect it to be as impressive as it is on stuff like ER: https://youtu.be/tepRUVNYAtc
This clip has the "ULTRA REALISM LIGHTING" mod or whatever it's called installed that strips all the vibrancy out of the game and blows out the sky. Just looks like complete ass independent of DLSS5.
hating AI is fine but to act like some of this DLSS stuff doesnt look good just because its AI related is nonsense. people are lying to themselves for some social credits
Yeah no shit it looks dead, DLSS 5 is a leak, and now people are applying a leaked demo tech to games that were not designed to use it. DLSS 5 is a feature for developers to use and refine their own work with precision, not to haphazardly paste onto already finished games. The whole outrage is completely stupid, get mad at AI's role in capitalism, mass surveillance and slop saturation, this shit is harmless, you all look like complete morons.
There's actually alot more info on how you can tweak dlss5 more than that over on the renodx discord. Let's just say this "clip" is tweaked in a way to make it look as controversial as possible.
Thank you. Classic gamer rage bait, remember how upset reddit got about ray tracing because people kept modding it into games that weren't designed with it in mind.
Considering there’s already a super realistic mod that people were already slobbering all over like a year ago or so is kinda funny to me. Also this isn’t just dlss 5 at work in the video. They’ve modded the game to hell and said “look what dlss5 has done to your game!”
When will the mods crack down on this shit? Here - let me help: "This is the most soulless things I seen a hacked dll jammed into a game it's not tuned for with the sliders in the hand of gamers instead of the creators to tune it". It's not as catchy or click bait, but it's more honest. Not saying DLSS 5 is great - I'm saying can we at least be honest about the conversation?
the combination of "less thinking" and "less empathy" hasn't ever been more intense and widespread than it is right now. social media absolutely fucked us as a species.
This shit is getting annoying. It's disingenuous as hell to post videos of games utilizing DLSS 5 in conjunction with other mods and claiming that all of the issues are from DLSS 5.
I was just neck deep in Cyberpunk about a month ago and this is truly fucking with me. This doesn't look like it at all but I recognize the area as that one area with the stadium being run by The Animals (Is that their name, its been a month or so lol)
The amount of zelous outrage I'm exposed to over an option on a toy is insane to me. If you don't like DLSS5 then don't use it. You have to follow a freaking guide to even get this bootlegged version of DLSS5 working on whatever random game is today's conduit for gamer rage.
This looks like an AI generated video rather than a video game XD Awkward-ass NPC pathing and movement doesn't work with this level of fidelity. It's like a fever dream.
One of the very consistent features of DLSS5 (besides crushing blacks, blowing out highlights and running what looks like a 1990s era sharpness filter 20 times) is that it kills depth of field. I don't know why anyone would want that.
By all means this looks like shit, but the idea that something isn't Cyberpunk because it doesn't have "woaaah cool neon lights!!!11" is equally as stupid.
That's one of my biggest gripes about the cyberpunk genre these days. People are so focused on the neon lights and the futuristic Japanese aesthetic and high-tech side of things that they forget about the other part that's integral to the genre: the low-life poverty, the social decay, the overarching theme of corporate colonialism and inequality and a system that has failed the many for the benefit of the few, and the resistance against these systems.
Like yeah, the Cyber is cool, but you need the Punk too.
One of the reasons why I think World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV has dominated the MMORPG space for so long... it's fantasy, and looks fantasy. It's a bit cartoony. It's a bit silly. It isn't realistic, nor does it try to be so.
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u/PaleFondant2488 Sep 02 '26
The one great thing about DLSS 5 is it’s going to help people realize art direction is what mattered more this entire time. Not resolution and ultra-realism.