Mar 17, 2026
3 min read
Do not like 2,000, hundreds of memes, an entire industry mocking: Nvidia's DLSS 5, which was announced as the most important image development since the turn of the ray, has become a thing of the public in less than a day.
"It looks like a broken YouTube thumbnail": Nvidia's DLSS 5 is a disaster
The story of enlightenment seems to be 2,000 misfits, hundreds of memes, an entire industry made fun of: Nvidia DLSS 5, heralded as the greatest graphics advance since ray tracing, turned into a public fiasco in less than a day.
On March 16, 2026, Jensen Huang took the stage at GTC San Jose to unveil DLSS 5, the new iteration of his AI-powered upscaling technology.The CEO called the breakthrough a "graphic moment for GPT."Except the community saw something completely different: an Instagram beauty filter placed on video games that no one asked to be faked.
DLSS 5: How the controversial technology works
The process is broken with previous versions.If Classic DLSS reproduces a high-quality image with low interpolation, or intermediate frames you want to smooth the display, DLSS 5 uses a real-time neural signal model.It takes the colors and motion dynamics of each image as input, and then "adds" the scene to AI-generated photorealistic lights and materials.He talks about bridging the gap between Hollywood's main roles.
"Art Direction ON / Art Direction OFF": festival ejekan
A demo video, broadcast by Digital Foundry, crystallized his anger.The first game was presented: Resident Evil Requiem, which became a symbol of disaster.The face of Grace Ashcroft, the heroine, returned from the expressive model and worked on a smoothed version, with swollen lips, with crossed cheekbones, as if through FaceTune.
The nickname "Yassify Filter" lasted a few minutes, referring to a Twitter bot that, in 2021, pushed AI beauty filters to be useless on pictures of celebrities with high-quality paintings: pale lips, smooth skin, zero expression, forced makeup used on every face.
On YouTube, the official video had 2,000 to 1,400 dislikes.One of the most-liked comments under the Digital Foundry video summed up the sentiment: "I thought it was an April Fool's joke, but it's still March."
At Bluesky, growth was immediate.Noclip's colleague Danny O'Dwyer observed that the technique "turns everyone into a ysified, retrospective monster", as it "can't help but sexualize everything through the prism of teenagers".
It's also strange how this amazing lighting technique turns everyone into dark freaks.Just like all technology can't help but sexualize everything it touches.But like, through a boy's eyes.www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zlw...
— dannyodwyer (@dannyodwyer.bsky.social)2026-03-16T20:15:46.805Z
IGN editor Lucy James found that the pun went viral: "DLYASS 5, more like."
DLYASS 5 likes
- Lucy James (@ lucyjames.games) 2026-03-16T19: 57: 47.750Z
Game videographer (Retronauts) Bob Mackey said, "Every copy of DLSS 5 I've seen looks like a YouTube thumbnail puzzle."
digital measurement: "It's so hard to argue with [dlss 5]" how hard is it to predict problems with technology that takes the concept of technology as a problem to fix and every example of dlss 5 I see makes everything look like a blurry youtube thumbnail, like we really are.
— 🐢 bobbi 📼 (@bobvids.com)2026-03-16T21:14:48.333Z
Angry Birds yassified and Kratos with a beauty filter: DLSS 5 became a meme
And memes.A user has upgraded to Angry Birds DLSS 5.Another gave Kratos a beauty filter makeover.The "DLSS OFF / DLSS ON" format became a complete meme within a few hours and was already mentioned in Know Your Meme.One Internet user suggested we "go to a LAN party and disable it on a friend's PC, like smoothing motion on your grandparents' TV on vacation."
On HardForum, the summary consisted of five words: "DLSS 5 aka AI Snapchat filter."A neologism on ResetEra is “DLLSlop”.Concept artist Jeff Talbot humorously raised the ire: "This is NOT the direction the game should be taking. They sacrificed the art direction in every shot. It's just a crappy AI filter."
A problem beyond cynicism
The demos run on dual RTX 5090 systems, with one GPU dedicated entirely to the DLSS 5 process. Chris Parsons pointed out the absurdity: "The principle of DLSS is that people can shoot in 4K. There, they have dedicated an entire GPU just for the lighting." Nvidia promises a single-GPU optimized version this fall, but there is no guarantee.
The funniest part of the DLSS 5 demo is that they say it works on two GPUs but will eventually run on one GPU.The point of DLSS is that you can run your game at 4K if you screw up.They have a full GPU for flattening illumination.
- Rat Person (@papapishu.bsky.social)2026-03-16T20:46:37.666Z
Even more troubling is the issue of art direction.We are no longer talking about augmentation when an AI model trained on massive amounts of biased data redraws the face of an artist-created character.We are talking about erasure.Jason (@singingpigs.online) reminds Bluesky (an accompanying research paper) that training material for images of women comes largely from pornography, explaining the systematic convergence of highly coded beauty standards.
Once you learn how to train sexualized image data, it's brilliant.It looks worse,Full text at display.arxiv.org/pdf/2110.01963
- jason 🔜 PAX Gabas (@singingpigs.online) 2026-03-16T21:01:13.937Z
Todd Howard, Bethesda and damage control: credibility
Nvidia has disabled comments on most YouTube videos dedicated to DLSS 5, with one exception, under which the company posted a clarifying message: DLSS 5 "is not a filter" and developers "retain full artistic control."The thing is, Nvidia also invited Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard to praise the technology the same day it was announced.
Howard said DLSS 5 is already working on Starfield and he thinks it's "incredible."The same person who openly stated a month ago that Bethesda is "incredibly focused" on AI because "artistic intent makes games special."The comeback did not go unnoticed.
Hours after the wave of criticism, Bethesda's official account posted a message stating that its art teams will “adjust the final effect” and that “everything will be under the control of our artists”.Adequate damage control.
Share your excitement and review of the new DLSS 5 lighting here.This is an early look and our art teams will continue to adjust the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game.All this will be under the control of our experts, and ...
— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) March 16, 2026
Fundamental questions remain if even Nvidia's own demo was carefully prepared for the global keynote.But it created the result that almost all viewers considered it to be inferior to the original.What should we expect from the final version? One ResetEra user concluded, “The 'DLSS 5 is graphics' GPT moment says it all.It's not what Nvidia thinks."
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