Nvidia surely thought it was doing a good thing for gamers by “upgrading” the faces of our favorite video game characters. But that just shows how much the company has lost the plot.
Nvidia could’ve marketed its new DLSS 5 real-time lighting technology as a way to make future, next-gen games look better. Instead, it told the world that games people already know and love look bad. It focused on retconning characters’ faces. And now, confronted with the predictable backlash, Nvidia’s CEO is telling critics that we’re “completely wrong.”
Regardless of how it works, the tech presents as an AI filter that tries to optimize everyone and everything — artists be damned.
A 15-year-old Hogwarts student? Now he’s like an adult soap opera star trying to pass as a teen:
An already-aged professor at Hogwarts? What if we made her look even older?
Do you like shadows? What if we just removed them in… Assassin’s Creed Shadows?
One answer: investors. Nvidia is now a $5 trillion AI company, and the average gamer probably seems like an afterthought when you spend all day selling chips to companies making chatbots. (Financially, even Nvidia’s networking business is bigger than gaming now.)
Other answers may be darker. Some gamers have railed against companies for years because, among other terrible things, their characters aren’t sexy enough.
Down the road, there’s another problem: Everything might start looking the same. As my colleague Andrew Webster points out, that’s what happens when your tech looks like AI slop. So what is Nvidia doing about this?
Damage control is underway. Nvidia GeForce PR director Ben Berraondo quickly told my colleague Tom Warren that developers like Capcom have “detailed artistic control” over their look of their characters, while also implying that the game’s developer approved the changes to Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace, above.
Meanwhile, Starfield game developer Bethesda tweeted, “This 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’ control, and totally optional for players.”
Here’s the pinned comment atop Nvidia’s YouTube video saying much the same:
Image: YouTube
But in an industry that just can’t stop having layoffs no matter how well games perform, people are skeptical that the artists will have creative control, and journalists are ready to hear from disgruntled developers among Nvidia’s DLSS 5 partners. (BTW, I’m sean.hollister01 on Signal.)
What I want to know is: How did Nvidia not see this backlash coming, especially after previous controversies?Why didn’t it take this new tech in a completely different direction, one focused on the future of gaming instead of the present?
Gamers seem less impressed with each new generation of gaming graphics. The graphical advances don’t 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 “more real” than gameplay.
That photorealism is exactly where Nvidia’s tech seems to be leaping forward, and I can’t help but agree with some of Digital Foundry’s enthusiasm when I watch their whole video at once. I want to see a generational leap in graphics, too. There’s an opportunity here.
But Nvidia’s examples kill me. No one should be retconning game characters’ faces like the examples we’ve seen above, regardless of whether they’re doing it with AI or different human actors.
It didn’t need to be this way! This same exact technology could have been a win for Nvidia — if it had marketed it for future next-gen games.
Imagine this: It’s March 16th, 2026, and Nvidia has one more thing to show us on the GTC 2026 stage — not a puppeteered Disney robot and a cringeworthy AI-generated music video, but a tech demo like none we’ve seen before. It’s a brand-new game we’ve 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’t clash with the art direction for this brand-new title!
Surely that took the power of an entire server to prerender, right? Nope, Nvidia reveals: It’s “the company’s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018.”* Some would say, Wow, I’d buy a new GPU or a GeForce Now subscription to play games that look like that!
*A real line from Nvidia’s press release.
But the real gasp would come when Nvidia’s 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 — they don’t require an investment in next-gen tech! It can build off what developers are already doing today. It’s like having an entirely new graphics engine, except you can keep using the engines you already have. Bethesda, Capcom, and Ubisoft could tell us — without showing us yassified faces — that they’ve seen such excellent results applying this to existing games that they can’t wait to bring us new ones.
Unfortunately, Nvidia didn’t 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. We’re only a year on from Nvidia’s latest “fake frames” controversy, and a month on from Google’s generative AI gaming backlash. By now, Nvidia should know better.