// KOTAKU — GAMING
Modders Have Been Playing Around With DLSS 5 And—Oh God, What The Hell Is That?!
Modders have had their hands on a leaked early version of Nvidia’s DLSS 5 for a few days now, testing the generative AI upscaling tool on a variety of games, and the reactions to the results contain everything from overawed glazing to barely contained disgust.
Announced back in March to a mountain of backlash, the tool renders games with a ridiculous degree of graphical realism, making characters look more like “real people,” the original artistic intent be damned. And some of the results look very damning indeed, bordering on nightmare fuel.
NVIDIA gotta cancel DLSS 5 while they still can bro just tried it with Halo and what is this shit 😭
Actual nightmare fuel like we don't need this pic.twitter.com/W9UD2HtNNh
It struggles to understand that she's COMPLETELY blue, including her face pic.twitter.com/7Z7m8SSF46
DLSS 5 just leaked and … Yeah … 🤮All artistic intent is gone. It looks so uncanny and gross. pic.twitter.com/PHYDWwaMSc
— Kaizen ✦ 3D Artist 🎨 (@Kaizen_3D) August 28, 2026
Even without the use of genAI, the quest for “realism” in games often produces results that look technically impressive but artistically generic. That generic-ness gets worse when it gets run through tech that, by design, can only produce results based on the millions of existing images it has stolen…err, been trained on.
“These DLSS 5 models keep putting the same face types on people,” a user wrote on Reddit. “It’s stripping away the actual characters faces from these games in favor of generic hyper-realistic filters trained on marketing studio photography.”
Even in games that seemingly hew close to photo-realism, like The Last of Us, DLSS 5 isn’t necessarily an improvement.