The CEO of Nvidia claims criticism about DLSS 5 is unjustified, as Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick offers a more sceptical view on generative AI in video games.
AI upscalers are commonly used to make games look and run better with higher resolutions and frame rates, but Nvidia has gone one step further with its controversial DLSS 5 technology.
The tech, which was unveiled earlier this week, uses generative AI and ‘hand-crafted rendering’ to alter visuals, in what Nvidia describes as a ‘dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression’.
In reality, and as demonstrated best through various comparison shots of Resident Evil Requiem, this changes protagonist Grace Ashcroft’s face to a dramatic degree – to the point where it feels entirely divorced from the creator’s original intent.
The technology has been criticised by many for stripping out the distinctive qualities of its visuals, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been typically strident in his defence of the concept.
‘Well, first of all, they’re completely wrong,’ Huang said (via Tom’s Hardware), when asked about the criticism of DLSS 5 during a Q&A at GTC 2026. ‘The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI.’
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Huang claims developers can ‘fine-tune the generative AI’ to make it correlate with the game’s visual style, and that the tech ‘doesn’t change the artistic control’.
‘It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level,’ he added. ‘All of that is in the control – direct control – of the game developer. This is very different than generative AI; it’s content-control generative AI. That’s why we call it neural rendering.’
None of that seems to matter though, when the response from ordinary gamers has been so negative and when, regardless of what is actually going on in terms of technology, the end result lots so ugly and soulless.
The big question now, especially after the backlash, is whether developers will actually want to use DLSS 5 technology for their games. Bethesda Game Studios, who used Starfield to showcase the technology as part of its announcement, asserted its use will be ‘under our artists’ control’ and ‘totally optional for players’.
Steve Karolewics, a rendering engineer at Respawn, wrote: ‘DLSS 5 looks like an overbearing contrast, sharpness, and airbrush filter. Remarkably different frames with the rationale of photo-real lighting? Nah, I think I’ll stick with the original artistic intent.’
If talk around generative AI tech often feels like a battle between business executives and creatives, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has emerged as a surprising voice of reason, from the former camp.
He’s been critical of its usefulness in the past, and in a recent interview with The Game Business, he laughed off the idea that AI tools like Google’s Project Genie could allow anyone to create games like GTA 6.
‘Not even the littlest bit,’ Zelnick said. ‘There’s already plenty of technology out there that allow people to create video games, and as a result, thousands of video games are created every year, and yet the hits all cluster among the large entertainment companies, almost entirely, and now and then, an indie, which is generally speaking well-funded and pretty robust in and of itself.
‘The notion that somehow new tools would allow an individual to push a button and generate a hit and bring it to many millions of consumers around the world, it’s a laughable notion.
‘It’s just never been the case with entertainment. Right now [in music] there are programs that allow you to put out a prompt and get a professionally recorded song spit back out at you. It sounds like a song, but I defy you to listen to it more than once. It’s great to send as a greeting card to your partner on their birthday, but that’s about it.’
That’s a remarkably sensible thing for a CEO to say and certainly bodes well for GTA 6. Whether casual gamers will care about generative AI in games – given how much it’s taken over in other fields – remains to be seen but the buzz around DLSS 5 at the moment seems to be mostly negative.
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