We take a look at how the gaming community is reacting to Nvidia’s new DLSS 5 technology
On March 16, 2026, Nvidia unveiled DLSS 5, the “most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018”. Online, however, the reactions are largely extremely negative.
DLSS 5 becomes a meme overnight
What happened? Nvidia has unveiled DLSS 5, the new generation of its in-house AI upscaler. However, it not only ensures higher resolutions and more frames, but also reworks the entire image.
The differences are quite impressive, but it is hard to deny that the results are sometimes very far removed from the original material. The faces shown in particular look very AI-generated.
Of course, there is a lot of discussion about this online and the overall mood is very negative. Under the official video, for example, one user writes that all the characters look like “Handsome Squidward”, the exaggeratedly pretty version of Thaddeus from a SpongeBob episode.
There are several posts on Reddit discussing this. One post with several images from the video has collected almost 2,200 comments and around 16,000 likes in just twelve hours. The changes to the original designs are also discussed in another post in particular.
What even is this dawg
by
u/the_possesed_cheese in
pcmasterrace
The images from Resident Evil Requiem in particular, which show the new protagonist Grace Ashcroft, are attracting a lot of interest. According to some users, the “improved” face is reminiscent of bad advertisements for porn sites and simply looks extremely generic.
The images may look more realistic, but any creative art style is lost. One user writes for example:
Finally a technology that sucks all artstyle from video games.
Numerous memes: Other users instead try their hand at a kind of gallows humor and create memes in which images are heavily modified. For example, a simple tree becomes a Deku tree from The Legend of Zelda and a monster from Resident Evil becomes a photo model.
Even the developers of Among Us have jumped on the bandwagon and posted their version of the meme on X:
https://t.co/Birn2c1jeY pic.twitter.com/LDErvCUw1Y
– Among Us (@AmongUsGame) March 16, 2026
Nvidia subsequently clarified in the presentation video that developers will have complete control over DLSS 5. So if you don’t want to incorporate the technology into your game, you can easily prevent this from happening.
In addition, this is all still up in the air.
At the moment, the release of DLSS 4.5 is pending, which will bring Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and a 6x mode, among other things.
DLSS 5 is scheduled for release in fall 2026, but is likely to come with fairly high hardware requirements. The first demos needed two RTX 5090s to work at all. So it will be a while before the AI revolution in gaming graphics takes place.
