Did DLSS 5 derail *Resident Evil 9*? This time, netizens had even sharper zingers

Funny.

But also spot-on.

This week, NVIDIA unveiled a DLSS 5 demo.

But instead of showing off the tech,

it first showed off distortion.

In the official presentation, Grace and Leon from Resident Evil 9: Requiem were overly rendered.

The characters didn’t look clearer.

They looked like they’d been reshaped by an algorithm.

So the direction of public reaction was simple.

Players weren’t discussing the improvements.

They were discussing the horror first.

Before long, some netizens turned the whole thing into a website.

The name was as direct as it gets.

“DLSS 5 Anything.”

Upload an image.

Click “DLSS 5 it!”.

And it generates a before-and-after comparison.

You can even export a sliding video.

So it can fully show you this bizarre transformation in action.

The fact that this kind of parody took off

shows the issue is no longer a one-off embarrassment.

It’s that a lot of people were never really convinced by the idea that “AI defines better image quality” to begin with.

Manufacturers say it looks more real.

Players see something weirder.

That gap is exactly where the meme explosion came from.

More interestingly, Grace became the face of this round of controversy.

It was a tech demo.

But what ended up going viral most was the main character becoming meme material.

That’s not exactly a good thing for Resident Evil 9: Requiem itself.

The game isn’t even out yet.

And the character has already been memed to death.

The original text also mentioned one detail.

It seems that companies like Bethesda may have been prepared for the demo in advance.

There was also a separate claim that Capcom had not been informed beforehand.

But there’s been no further confirmation on that point.

So it can only be treated as background context.

Not as a conclusion.

My view is simple.

It’s not that players hate new technology.

What players hate is having aesthetics force-fed to them.

What supersampling is supposed to do is preserve the original look and feel.

Not rewrite a character’s facial features.

If a technology goes viral every time it appears only because netizens parody it first,

then at the very least, it has already lost at the presentation stage.

And the trend is already clear.

From now on, whenever companies talk about AI image quality,

players will look at the face first.

They’ll first check whether there’s any “mutation.”

Only then will they talk about frame rates and detail.

As for how ordinary players see it,

the community has already voted this time.

Not with buttons.

But with memes.

And that’s more real than any livestream comment flood at a launch event.