Regardless of how it works, the tech presents as an AI filter that tries to optimize everyone and everything \u2014 artists be damned.<\/p>\n
A 15-year-old Hogwarts student? Now he\u2019s like an adult soap opera star trying to pass as a teen:<\/p>\n
An already-aged professor at Hogwarts? What if we made her look even older?<\/p>\n
Do you like shadows? What if we just removed them in\u2026 Assassin\u2019s Creed Shadows?<\/p>\n
One answer: investors. Nvidia is now a $5 trillion AI company<\/a>, and the average gamer probably seems like an afterthought when you spend all day selling chips to companies making chatbots. (Financially, even Nvidia\u2019s networking business is bigger than gaming<\/a> now.)<\/p>\n Other answers may be darker. Some gamers have railed against companies for years because, among other<\/a> terrible things<\/a>, their characters aren\u2019t sexy enough.<\/p>\n Down the road, there\u2019s another problem: Everything might start looking the same. As my colleague Andrew Webster points out, that\u2019s what happens when your tech looks like AI slop<\/a>. So what is Nvidia doing about this?<\/p>\n Damage control is underway. Nvidia GeForce PR director Ben Berraondo quickly told my colleague Tom Warren that developers like Capcom have \u201cdetailed artistic control\u201d<\/a> over their look of their characters, while also implying that the game\u2019s developer approved the changes to Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace, above.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Starfield game developer Bethesda tweeted<\/a>, \u201cThis is a very early look, and our art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game. This will all be under our artists\u2019 control, and totally optional for players.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the pinned comment atop Nvidia\u2019s YouTube video saying much the same:<\/p>\n Image: YouTube<\/p>\n But in an industry that just can\u2019t stop having layoffs<\/a> no matter how well games perform<\/a>, people are skeptical that the artists will have creative control, and journalists are ready to hear<\/a> from disgruntled developers among Nvidia\u2019s DLSS 5 partners. (BTW, I\u2019m sean.hollister01 on Signal.)<\/p>\n What I want to know is: How did Nvidia not see this backlash coming, especially after previous controversies<\/a>?Why didn\u2019t it take this new tech in a completely different direction, one focused on the future of gaming instead of the present?<\/p>\n Gamers seem less impressed with each new generation of gaming graphics. The graphical advances don\u2019t seem as big as they were between Super Nintendo and N64, between PS1 and PS2, between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Photorealism has managed to stay elusive even in the 4K era, with many games still delivering muddy graphics, rough textures, and cutscenes that look \u201cmore real\u201d than gameplay.<\/p>\n That photorealism is exactly where Nvidia\u2019s tech seems to be leaping forward, and I can\u2019t help but agree with some of Digital Foundry\u2019s enthusiasm when I watch their whole video<\/a> at once. I want to see a generational leap in graphics, too. There\u2019s an opportunity here.<\/p>\n But Nvidia\u2019s examples kill me. No one should be retconning game characters\u2019 faces like the examples we\u2019ve seen above, regardless of whether they\u2019re doing it with AI or different human actors<\/a>.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t need to be this way! This same exact technology could have been a win for Nvidia \u2014 if it had marketed it for future next-gen games.<\/p>\n Imagine this: It\u2019s March 16th, 2026, and Nvidia has one more thing to show us on the GTC 2026 stage \u2014 not a puppeteered Disney robot and a cringeworthy AI-generated music video<\/a>, but a tech demo like none we\u2019ve seen before. It\u2019s a brand-new game we\u2019ve never heard of, and the level of detail is incredible. Look at the water! Look at how light naturally seems to envelop those video game objects you could practically reach out and touch! Look at how you can make out every stone in that castle wall, and how these characters naturally cast shadows on themselves! Look at this world filled with natural light and gorgeous characters that actually belong, because they don\u2019t clash with the art direction for this brand-new title!<\/p>\n Surely that took the power of an entire server to prerender, right? Nope, Nvidia reveals: It\u2019s \u201cthe company\u2019s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018.\u201d* Some would say, Wow, I\u2019d buy a new GPU or a GeForce Now subscription to play games that look like that!<\/p>\n *A real line from Nvidia\u2019s press release.<\/p>\n But the real gasp would come when Nvidia\u2019s CEO flicks a switch to turn it on and off. Not only is this next-gen game demo running in real time, the base graphics are so much more rudimentary \u2014 they don\u2019t require an investment in next-gen tech! It can build off what developers are already doing today. It\u2019s like having an entirely new graphics engine, except you can keep using the engines you already have. Bethesda, Capcom, and Ubisoft could tell us \u2014 without showing us yassified faces \u2014 that they\u2019ve seen such excellent results applying this to existing games that they can\u2019t wait to bring us new ones.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Nvidia didn\u2019t decide to market the tech this way. Nvidia lumped it in with DLSS, the same suite of AI-enhanced performance-enhancing technologies that many gamers love to hate, at the same time PC gamers are reeling from Nvidia-powered AI servers creating a worldwide shortage of RAM<\/a>. We\u2019re only a year on from Nvidia\u2019s latest \u201cfake frames\u201d controversy<\/a>, and a month on from Google\u2019s generative AI gaming backlash<\/a>. 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