Predictably, despite the lavish praise from Digital Foundry experts and NVIDIA's reassurance that DLSS 5 would be tunable by game developers to respect their artistic intent, the explosive announcement of the new technology during CEO Jensen Huang's GTC 2026 keynote has already attracted a vocal anti-AI crowd that has since bashed DLSS 5 heavily on social media for being "an AI filter", "slop", and for going against the work of human artists.
However, the tech also has plenty of supporters. One of them is JP (Jean Pierre) Kellams, a veteran developer who started his career working on localization and game writing at CAPCOM on titles like Devil May Cry 4, GODHAND, and Bionic Commando. He then joined PlatinumGames at its founding and worked as a writer and music coordinator on titles such as Bayonetta, MadWorld, Vanquish, Anarchy Reigns, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, The Wonderful 101, and Bayonetta 2 before being promoted to lead producer on the ill-fated Scalebound.
Following Scalebound's cancellation, he returned to the US to work on EA's Madden team in Orlando from 2017 to 2021, serving as development director and producer. For the last five years, he's been a lead producer on the Harmonix team (which was acquired by Epic Games in late 2021) to help "develop musical journeys and gameplay for Fortnite, starting with Fortnite Festival."
Kellams didn't mince words in his tweeted response to the anti-DLSS 5 folks:
All you guys roasting DLSS 5 like it doesn’t look better/is detracting from art direction are absolutely insane. The lighting and shading improvements are bonkers. If that was shown as a next-gen hardware reveal and not “AI” you guys would be going nuts like the Watch Dogs demo.
I get that some very vocal people don’t like AI. But guess what. Technology doesn’t care if you like it. It is a tool. AI isn’t coming. It is here. Just this morning, my oncologist was telling me all the ways it is helping cancer treatment and research.
Kellams then highlighted that AI-based technologies could enable marginalized creators to make their dreams a reality. He admitted that the transition is likely to be painful for some people, but likened it to similar technological transitions in the past, like going from candles to electricity, from landlines to cellphones, or from mail to e-mail.
Kellams is not the only one. There's another renowned voice in the tech industry who has spoken in favor of DLSS 5 on X with a nuanced take: tech journalist Ryan Shrout, formerly the founder and president of PC Perspective, then the senior director of gaming at Intel, and, more recently, the president of Signal65, a technical marketing and competitive analysis company affiliated with Six Five Media and the Futurum Group.
Shrout, like Digital Foundry, watched the DLSS 5 demo in-person and pointed out that while some people's first reaction to the "new" faces may be understandable due to a psychological effect, the improvements are much broader than that.
The visual improvements are significant. Not incremental. Significant. But if you've been scrolling social media, you'd think NVIDIA just shipped an Instagram beauty filter for video games. And I get why that's the first reaction. But it misses the true picture by a wide margin.
[...] I've probably seen ten different "floating head" tech demos over the course of my career. That's not an exaggeration. They're always a single head with no hair, no body, no environment, because rendering a photorealistic face at that level of quality is so expensive that it can only be done in isolation. You never see it inside an actual game, because the performance budget won't allow it. DLSS 5 closes that gap in a pretty dramatic way. And because that's the area where the delta between "before" and "after" is most visible, that's what everyone is reacting to. The NVIDIA team put it well during my demo. It's a psychological effect. You've seen environments rendered really well before. When you suddenly see a character rendered at that same photorealistic level, your brain flags it immediately. It stands out. Fair enough. But focusing only on the faces is wrong.
In Starfield, there's a countertop scene with a coffee machine, some paper towels, a cup, napkin holders. Standard environmental clutter. With DLSS 5 off, everything looks flat. The coffee maker fades into the background. Toggle it on, and suddenly the objects have shape. The lighting wraps around them naturally.
The same thing played out across every title. In Oblivion Remastered, the water went from good video game water to something that could pass for real, with the kind of light interaction and shimmer you'd expect from an offline render. In Assassin's Creed Shadows, the trees and distant foliage gained dramatically better depth and separation in how light moved from the canopy down through the branches.
Shrout stressed that it's not a filter but a much more complex unified model capable of scanning a frame, recognizing the game's assets, and processing them based on how light should behave when interacting with them. He also noted the granular level of control developers will be able to exercise to ensure the game looks like what they want it to look, thanks to spatial masking, color grading controls, etc.
Ultimately, he closed his article with this statement:
The early social media reaction is predictable. New technology that changes how games look will always generate strong opinions, especially when AI is involved. But the knee-jerk "it's just a face filter" take doesn't hold up once you've actually seen the full scope of what DLSS 5 is doing across an entire scene, across multiple games, in real time. Go look at a coffee maker. Go look at stone textures. Go look at the way light passes through a leaf. That's where the real story is.
No doubt, there will be many more reactions from both sides of the argument to the reveal of this groundbreaking technology. Stay tuned on Wccftech for more as we report it, and share your own opinions in the comments below.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
