Did *Resident Evil: Requiem* flop? Players are tearing DLSS 5 apart

The most jarring thing isn’t the change in frame rate, but that the faces have changed. The texture and atmosphere that should have been there are covered over by a kind of “AI repaint” feel, and that is also at the heart of the controversy around DLSS 5 this time.

At this week’s GTC 2026, Nvidia officially unveiled DLSS 5 and even called it “the most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since real-time ray tracing.” Big words, and the hype was certainly turned all the way up. But as of publication, the official 70-second trailer had already surpassed one million views on YouTube, and out of 98,000 reactions, about 16,000 were likes and 82,000 were dislikes, for an approval rate of just 16.3%. At that point, it’s basically no longer a controversy, but a full-on crash into a wall.

Even more awkwardly, the five comparison demos released alongside it—covering titles like Resident Evil: Requiem, Starfield, and Hogwarts Legacy—also had approval rates ranging from 15% to 19%. Players’ complaints are highly consistent: DLSS 5 does indeed make visuals smoother, but it also seems to use AI-generated content to alter the original art style. Character facial details in particular have drawn criticism, with many saying it looks like an “influencer beauty filter” has been applied—pretty, sure, but no longer like the original game.

On that point, I can completely understand why players are so sensitive. There has long been a consensus in the indie game scene: technology should serve expression, not swallow it whole. The pixel art in Celeste isn’t “realistic,” but you wouldn’t want a system to automatically “fix” it into high-definition illustrations. The expressions in Undertale are even a bit rough, but that flavor is its soul. The same applies to AAA games. In a work like Resident Evil: Requiem, which relies heavily on atmosphere and character expressions, once the distinctive quality of the faces is smoothed out by an algorithm, even the highest frame rate feels like the cast has been replaced.

A former RDR2 developer put the criticism very bluntly: the technology feels like “using AI to completely repaint the entire image,” so what players are seeing is no longer the original game. That may not be 100% precise, but it hits the most important anxiety right on the mark—are we playing the game the developers made, or watching a version that the GPU maker has processed a second time for us?

In the face of the backlash, Nvidia didn’t hide. It pinned an explanation directly under the trailer, emphasizing that DLSS 5 is not just a simple filter and that developers have full control over intensity, color grading, and regional masking, with the final result still rooted in the original 3D source content. Jensen Huang’s earlier stance was even more hardline, arguing that people criticizing DLSS 5 were “completely wrong.”

Interestingly, the problem may lie not in whether “it can be adjusted,” but in the fact that “the default look scared people off first.” It’s like taking an already exquisite pixel-art vignette and layering on dynamic lighting and depth-of-field effects—lots of functionality, but not necessarily a better fit. There’s nothing wrong with the technical direction, but the way it was demonstrated clearly backfired.

Looking at the trend, AI graphics technology is only going to become more prominent in the future. But unfortunately, the signal players are sending right now is also very clear: we accept frame generation, we accept optimization, and we even accept some clever performance-saving shortcuts—but we are not very willing to accept our artistic style being quietly rewritten. Especially for works like Resident Evil: Requiem that live or die by their atmosphere, stable frame rates are of course important, but preserving the “original face” matters even more.

If Nvidia really wants DLSS 5 to gain a firm foothold, the next step is probably not to keep shouting about revolution, but to provide more transparent toggles, more intuitive comparisons, and to truly hand “artistic control” back to developers and players. No matter how powerful the technology is, don’t “fix” a game into becoming a different game.