Epic Games lead producer calls gamers thinking DLSS 5 detracts from art direction 'insane'

NVIDIA unveiled DLSS 5 at GTC 2026, and the reception from the new technology has been anything but pleasant, with large portions of the gaming community describing the tech as AI slop.

The criticism of the latest generation of DLSS has even been recognized by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who said people are "completely wrong" about DLSS 5, particularly the aspect where some characters look completely different than their original design. Concerned gamers pointed to examples such as Resident Evil: Requiem, as the DLSS 5 On image showcased a stark change in the character model. Notably, Capcom developers recently said they found out the title was being used in the presentation at the same time as the public.

NVIDIA's Jensen Huang responded to a question from Tom's Hardware, saying, "Well, first of all, they're completely wrong. The reason for that is because, as I have explained very carefully, DLSS 5 fuses controllability of the of geometry and textures and everything about the game with generative AI."

Huang added, "All of that is in the control - direct control - of the game developer," he said. This is very different than generative AI; it's content-control generative AI. That's why we call it neural rendering."

Similar sentiments have now been echoed by Jean Pierre Kellams, a tech lead producer from Epic Games, who said, "All you guys roasting DLSS 5 like it doesn't look better/is detracting from art direction are absolutely insane. The lighting and shading improvements are bonkers. If that was shown as a next-gen hardware reveal and not"AI"you guys would be going nuts like the Watch Dogs demo."

"If I was a technical artist, I'd be begging for this right now. It's essentially making super high resolution physically accurate lighting trivially cheap. If this is the demo, I can't wait until tech artists start really digging in," added Kellams