The reveal of NVIDIA DLSS 5 certainly didn't leave anybody unmoved. Between people who praised it as one of the most impressive demos and as a next-generation moment for graphics, and the strong backlash of many who view it as little more than an AI filter corrupting the original artistic vision of a game, the technology's debut at GTC 2026 has undoubtedly riled up gamers on both sides of the argument.
Amidst all the noise created by such a heated public debate, it may be hard to find nuanced takes. That's what I sought when I reached out to Pascal Gilcher, also known as Marty McFly, the renowned rendering engineer, artist, and modder who is best known for creating the first and arguably best RTGI shader for ReShade. Since RTGI's original release back in May 2019, the shader, through its various iterations, has been used to enhance the graphics of older PC games with screen-space ray traced effects.
Eventually, it became so popular that NVIDIA added it to the GeForce Experience Freestyle suite of graphics filters. The GeForce company was already familiar with Gilcher's work, who was previously an NVIDIA employee. Needless to say, this makes him a great choice to provide us with a technically sound and relevant opinion on DLSS 5. As you'll read in the full quote below, Gilcher is impressed with the technology on one hand, but also shares the AI slop sentiment others have expressed, adding that there is "zero elegance" to this kind of approach.
I think it's an impressive tech, but I too share the "AI slop" sentiment to a big degree. I doubt that these models, given the way they work, can ever be bullied to not cause wrong faces and such things. They are required to produce invasive results… yet not be invasive. The way I suspect it works is this: they need some sort of prior to train the model on. This would need to be unrealistic images and photorealistic ones. But… how does one create a wide variety of such image pairs? The answer is a GAN. They likely have a massive collection of game screenshots and a lot of real photos, probably scraped from the Web. That's also where that "Instagram" style that every face gets comes from.
They train a large model to distinguish real from fake. And then they train a second, smaller model to turn the game screenshots into photorealistic ones 1:1. Its training reward is how well it can fool the other model. They can use very large models for both, since the only goal is to get 1:1 A/B pairs of realistic vs. unrealistic images. Finally, you can then train/distill a smaller model off that that learns the regular way, turning an unrealistic image into a corresponding photorealistic one.
In general, I find all AI lately extremely boring. I know that there is lots of genuinely impressive research on ML models and I have experience with ML development, but even with a strong math background, a lot of it feels like wandering in the dark. Zero elegance with this, just throwing compute a problem from different angles. It's just so lame, which seems the zeitgeist of lots of tech at the moment.
We're actively seeking to engage with more developers, engineers, and artists to learn what they think of DLSS 5. If you're in the industry or are a modder and want to share your thoughts on it, feel free to reach out via email. In the meantime, you can read my op-ed article about what really went wrong with the reveal.
In case you're wondering, Gilcher is still very active on the modding scene. While there are unfortunately no updates on the promising ReShade path tracer showcased over two years ago in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which was the subject of my previous interview with Gilcher, the modder has just released a completely rewritten iMMERSE Pro: Depth of Field shader, which he claims visually beats Unreal Engine's own Depth of Field while staying competitive in performance thanks to a very efficient software-based implementation of DirectX 12's Variable Rate Shading (VRS).
Gilcher also promises an "eerily accurate" autofocus that consistently locks onto the intended subject. You can take a look at the Depth of Field shader in the embedded video below; it is available to Patreon subscribers from the "RAY TRACERS" tier (€4.50 monthly) upward.
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.
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