As an old saying goes, fair ladies are a gentleman's desire.
Even gentlemen who strictly followed ritual propriety in the past loved fair ladies, so us stinky gamers are no exception—players with extensive experience in the 3D section... uh, I mean, 3D games, mostly understand this deeply. Especially in recent years when politically correct companies like SBI are rampant, and strange creatures of indeterminate gender fly around everywhere, those veteran heroines who have long dominated black-and-yellow websites appear even more precious.
Without further ado, let's quickly enter today's segment of appreciating beautiful pictures and make the guys in the House of Commons happy.
Come on! Show the gameplay!
First, we have the Jerusalem that our 3D section cannot lose, the undisputed T0 tier in both figure and looks, the most charming heroine recognized in the gaming world for thirty years, possessing both great personality and great appearance, and together with Lara Croft called the "poster girl of the cyber generation" by The New York Times—Tifa Lockhart...
Wait, who are you?
I must have opened it wrong just now.
Next approaching us is one of the most successfully crafted heroines under Square Enix, one of the few who can compete with Tifa for the title of Queen of the 3D Section, and the eternal regret of countless "Final Fantasy VII" players—Aerith Gainsborough. The latest installment, "Rebirth," expanded Aerith's role significantly, further cementing her quirky girlish image in people's hearts...
Girlish... image?
Forget about SE; let's look at Capcom in the distance instead.
As everyone knows, Capcom is excellent at creating eye-catching female characters. Back in the arcade era of the late last century, they created Chun-Li in the legendary "Street Fighter" series, a character who influenced generations. If anyone deserves credit for popularizing the impression that "Chinese girl = ox-horn buns," it's Chun-Li.
Although in recent generations of games, due to the progression of the timeline, Chun-Li has gradually been teased as an auntie, she takes good care of herself. In the latest "Street Fighter 6," if not breathtakingly beautiful, she is at least still retaining her charm... right?
Let's restart.
As everyone knows, Capcom is excellent at creating eye-catching female characters. Mizutsune and Hinoa, the Wyverian sisters serving as quest givers in Kamura Village from "Monster Hunter Rise," are prime examples. Who wouldn't want to desperately max out affinity with these beautiful, elegant, mysterious Wyverian sisters who are both childhood friends and shrine maidens, and go hunting together?
So beautiful...
Uh... where is the beauty?
Never mind, let's just take on a single-player mission.
Thinking this, I walked over to Princess Kiche, and then... was scared into having a massive bowel movement.
Well, the vibe in the 3D section seems a bit off today. Let's return to the comfort zone of 2D anime. Didn't the demo for "Trails in the Sky the 2nd" just come out recently? Veteran Trails fans know: in our youth, we didn't appreciate Scherazard and mistakenly cherished Estelle as a treasure. Dark skin, white hair, hot body, carefree personality, and a love for alcohol—this kind of dominant, messy onee-san is simply delicious... Hehe, I can't wait to jump into the game and reunite with Sister Schera.
Grandma, do you need help crossing the street?
Smart kids must have noticed that the faces of the characters mentioned earlier seem somewhat abnormal—their skin tones are dull, their skin is pitted, deep nasolabial folds are carved beside their noses, young girls become aunties, mature ladies become grandmas, and everyone looks twenty years older.
The culprit behind all this is precisely the DLSS 5 technology announced by NVIDIA this March.
Here, I should explain to those unfamiliar with hardware specs what DLSS is. In short, it's an AI-based graphics rendering acceleration technology developed by NVIDIA. The usual approach is to have the GPU's traditional rasterization units render a lower-resolution version first, then let the AI unit "generate" a corresponding high-resolution version based on that low-res input, thereby significantly reducing the load on traditional rasterization units and boosting graphics performance.
Eight years have passed since this technology was born, and its application scope has gradually expanded—initially, it was just a rough native frame amplifier, accompanied by side effects like ghosting, trailing, and jitter. But in the latest official version, it can boost a mere 30 native frames to over 300 frames at esports levels by "stitching frames together."
DLSS 5, as the "next-generation technology," takes this a step further—it is no longer satisfied with subordinate tasks like upscaling images or boosting frame rates, but instead begins to dominate visual texture in a manner similar to a "filter." NVIDIA says their goal is to "achieve a breakthrough leap in game visual fidelity."
In the official demonstration, you can clearly see the difference between DLSS 5 being on and off—not only does the lighting on characters seem re-rendered, but even their facial features change. Uncle Leon's wrinkles between his eyebrows are noticeably deeper, his stubble is thicker, and Grace transforms from an innocent younger sister into a capable mature lady.
Once the technology was announced, it sparked huge discussions in the player community. Many believed that AI intervention affected the creators' original intentions, turning developers' "hand-crafted craftsmanship" into AI-generated influencer faces. Others identified it as the future development path for graphics after the death of Moore's Law.
Regardless, everyone at the time believed this was just a technical demonstration by NVIDIA for the next generation of DLSS, and that there would surely be a long period of polishing before the technology was truly implemented.
Unexpectedly, just half a year later, the neural rendering core component of DLSS 5 was extracted from the "Early Access" files of "NBA 2K27" and officially released by NVIDIA a few days later. This plugin has achieved a surprising level of completion; not only can various parameters be manually adjusted, but it can even be "externally connected" to capture cards to "buff" any footage captured—meaning, theoretically, you can now run Switch 2 games using DLSS 5.
Players, eager to try their new toy, rushed into every game they wanted to improve visually, and then... the scene described at the beginning occurred.
Needless to say, various cringe-worthy AI auntie faces immediately became targets of mockery in the player community. Memes about DLSS 5 from six months ago were circulated wildly again, and some troublemakers exploited the feature that DLSS 5 can be applied to any window, adding filters to scenes already redrawn by DLSS 5, resulting in god-awful effects akin to "Google Translate 500 times"...
Please note that the images below may cause discomfort.
However, before you pronounce DLSS 5 dead, please wait a moment.
I know the underlying logic behind Old Huang's AI adding shadows and nasolabial folds to character faces is hard to swallow, but I still want to speak fairly for DLSS 5—most of the cringe-worthy screenshots shown earlier were results of directly applying the default presets from "NBA 2K27." As everyone knows, "NBA 2K27" is a game that focuses on "restoring the real appearances of stars" in its visuals. Using these parameters on handsome men and beautiful women naturally leads to poor results.
On the contrary, DLSS 5 when actually used in "NBA 2K27" performs quite stunningly—the characters' faces are a bit too real, to the point that some movements with the traditional 2K sliding steps feel slightly uncanny.
Moreover, the plugin itself comes with a rich set of adjustable parameters, allowing details such as facial "realism" correction to be tweaked—if you've used various ENB filters for "The Elder Scrolls V," this won't feel unfamiliar. If you're willing to tinker, most games, including "Trails in the Sky the 2nd," can be adjusted to look decent, and the so-called "auntie face" filter can be completely turned off.
Image source: Bilibili user "Yuzu Constellation P in the Night Sky"
Among them, older games represented by "Monster Hunter GU" show the most stunning effects—lighting texture, spatial sense, and clarity have all improved significantly. If you ignore the flickering caused by DLSS 5's recognition accuracy issues, as well as the huge performance loss and operational latency from using previous-generation cards to run next-gen technology, you could almost view it as a small-scale "HD Remake."
Image source: Bilibili user "Yiren HTP"
Many players have applied DLSS 5 to where it shines brightest—a genre of games whose visuals generally need enhancement, preferring a more realistic style; where sufficient frame rates are enough without worrying about latency; and which includes many classic titles urgently needing modern remakes...
Exactly.
The effect of applying DLSS 5 to various gentlemen's games is surprisingly good. Forget about "someday"; even doing it today yields significant improvements... provided you first turn off that auntie-face filter in the plugin, otherwise, we won't be responsible for any work-related injuries inflicted on the little brothers in the House of Commons.
These are just the results of players roughly tweaking the leaked version of DLSS 5 themselves. With major manufacturers holding more resources and professionalism, how DLSS 5 will perform remains to be seen—at the very least, the final presentation should be considerably better than what we see now.
So, will DLSS 5 and AI generation really become the future of graphics?
Considering the currently slowing growth rate of traditional rasterization performance and NVIDIA's heavy investment in AI as the leader in the graphics industry, this possibility is quite high. However, in such a "future," we may have to face several huge problems.
Please find "Games" or "Graphics" on the NVIDIA official website homepage
The primary concern is whether creators can still correctly convey their creative intentions.
For the vast majority of people, including programmers and art designers who now widely use AI in their work, large AI models are like black boxes. We can only control the training materials and prompts at the input end, but cannot directly intervene in the generation process or results—it's like throwing tokens to a big blue fat fish; before it spits something out, no one knows whether it will work properly, slack off, or secretly curse the user.
As a result, users find it difficult to precisely control the generated output, at best getting results that "approximate" their initial vision. Many AI art creators have complained about this, saying that while it's easy to get AI to draw a pretty picture, making it produce an image that fully meets specific requirements is as hard as climbing to heaven.
Meanwhile, limited by the underlying logic of generative AI, there is inevitably some convergence in how it solves problems—in AI images, we call this the "AI taste"; in AI articles, we call it "AI clichés." Although DLSS 5 is essentially based on native rasterized rendering, so the "cliché" phenomenon might not be as severe, we can still sense AI's stereotypical understanding of "realism" from those identical auntie faces with deep nasolabial folds shown at the beginning.
When creators feed their intentions to AI, and AI then conveys those intentions to users, how much of what is finally presented on screen is the creator's original idea, and how much is AI's guess, generation, and completion?
At the very least, the authors of those old games "remade" by DLSS 5 certainly didn't consider this layer.
Now, let's take a step back and assume the creator's true intention was achieved through the power of DLSS 5.
A new question arises—can players really successfully receive the intentions creators convey using DLSS 5?
The currently leaked DLSS 5 model nearly maxes out the RT Core of the RTX 5090—that is, its AI computing unit. Once DLSS 5 runs at full power, even the best consumer-grade graphics cards on the market will see their frame rates halved. Even if future 60-series cards can run DLSS 5 with minimal performance loss, what about the large number of users still on previous-generation cards or AMD GPUs?
Similar problems actually appeared long ago.
Since the birth of PC gaming, "graphics options" have been inseparable from it. Users with high-end PCs and low-end PCs objectively receive different information. However, most of the time, creators optimize content for different quality settings to ensure the conveyed intent remains largely consistent.
But after the birth of ray tracing technology, Everythinggj seemed different.
The prologue scene of "Resident Evil 9" is a perfect example—with ray tracing turned off, the facial shadows on the protagonist Grace seem to disappear completely, making the visual effect very poor. Clearly, the designer's intent was conveyed with ray tracing enabled, but players without high-end RTX graphics cards are left with the terrible effect seen on the left.
You could certainly say this is purely Capcom being lazy; if they had properly pre-baked shadows for Grace's face even without ray tracing, they could have replicated the ray-traced effect—but the problem is, if even a company like Capcom is relying on ray tracing while neglecting traditional rasterization, what about other companies with more limited resources who still want to present better visuals?
With an AI filter applied and AI ray tracing enabled, the improvement in visual quality is tangible. There's no reason not to use it.
If we delve deeper, this might involve the heavy topic of "whether poor people deserve to play games properly," so we will stop here for now.
At 12:00 on September 4th, "NBA 2K27" officially launched, becoming the first and currently only game to officially support DLSS 5, and this support lineup is expected to continue expanding in the foreseeable future.
In response, competitors like AMD might rise to the challenge again as they did with FSR, or they might not. AI filters led by DLSS 5 might be embraced and widely used, or they might fade into obscurity after a brief trend... Regardless, future players wanting to play games that convey designers' ideas in their "original flavor" will likely need the latest RTX graphics card.
This is Jensen Huang's open conspiracy. I looked at my wallet and gnashed my teeth in anger.