Before *Resident Evil 9* Is Even Released, Has DLSS 5 Already Scared Everyone Half to Death?

In the dim street, the rain clung to the lens like a thin film. Before the person even spoke, their face had already sent a chill down my spine. Not because the uncanny valley was done too well, but because of that unsettling feeling of “it’s clearly her, and yet it’s as if something has quietly replaced her,” like the darkest scene in a psychological thriller: you stare at someone familiar, and after three seconds, suddenly realize something is wrong.

Recently, veteran animator Mike York publicly blasted NVIDIA’s DLSS 5, aiming straight at Resident Evil 9: Requiem. This guy has worked on projects ranging from Grand Theft Auto V to Death Stranding 2, so he’s seen more than enough visuals over the years, which is exactly why his reaction felt especially jarring. In a livestream on his own YouTube channel, “York Street Gaming,” after watching Digital Foundry’s hands-on DLSS 5 video released on March 16, he was extremely direct, even saying no three times in a row, calling this direction “absolutely not okay.”

What he focused on was a widely circulated image from Resident Evil 9: Requiem. York argued that the protagonist Grace’s face didn’t look like normal real-time optimization at all, but more like AI had completely repainted a new layer of skin over it. The facial structure that should have been there had been smoothed into the kind of artificial softness you see in short-video beauty filters, and even the eyes showed obvious abnormalities. In his view, this wasn’t just a lighting change, but a “complete AI re-render.” His verdict was brutal: “Who is this? This is already a different person,”

What makes it even more unsettling is that DLSS 5 hasn’t even officially rolled out on a large scale yet. Based on currently known information, the technology is planned to debut in select games this fall. NVIDIA’s official description sounds polished: introducing real-time neural rendering models to inject pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials. Jensen Huang even called it the “GPT moment” for graphics. It sounds like a revolution. But if the price of that revolution is turning a character’s face into an unfamiliar mask, then this isn’t progress—it’s distortion.

Stepping back, what’s really worth discussing here isn’t just Resident Evil 9 as a single game, but a broader trend: AI graphics technology is becoming more and more deeply involved in determining what the “final image” actually looks like. For racing games, open worlds, and distant vegetation, that may be a good thing; but for horror games, the subtle authenticity of facial micro-expressions, eye focus, and skin texture is often more important than a few extra frames of ray tracing. And what does psychological horror fear most? It fears characters that don’t quite look human, yet insist on pretending to be. That oppressive feeling is like a frog being boiled in warm water, dragging you little by little into the uncanny valley.

My personal view is simple: if you expect Resident Evil 9: Requiem to hit hard through atmosphere and performance, then DLSS 5 deserves a wait-and-see attitude—at the very least, don’t rush to automatically equate “AI enhancement” with a “graphics upgrade.” The focus of discussion in the player community will likely shift from “is it clearer” to “is that still the character’s original face.” Horror games fear cheap jump scares most, but they also fear cheap realism. If the monster looks fake, people can still laugh it off; if the protagonist’s face looks fake, the soul of the entire experience falls apart first.