Nvidia has lost the plot with gamers

Nvidia surely thought it was doing a good thing for gamers by “improving” the faces of our favorite video game characters. But it shows how far the company has lost ground.

Nvidia could have marketed its new DLSS 5 real-time lighting technology as a way to make future, new generation the games are better. Instead, he told the world that the games people already know and love look bad. He focused on reconnecting the characters’ faces. And now, faced with the predictable backlash, Nvidia’s CEO is telling critics we’re “completely wrong.”

Regardless of how it works, the technology presents itself as an AI filter that attempts to optimize everything and everyone – artists be damned.

A 15 year old Hogwarts student? Now he looks like an adult soap opera star trying to pass himself off as a teenager:

An already elderly professor at Hogwarts? What if we made it equal older?

Do you like shadows? What if we just deleted them in… Shadows of Assassin’s Creed?

One answer: investors. Nvidia is now a $5 trillion AI company, and the average gamer probably seems like an afterthought when they spend all day selling chips to companies making chatbots. (Financially, even Nvidia’s networking business is now bigger than gaming.)

Other answers may be darker. Some players have been attacking corporations for years because, among other terrible things, their characters aren’t sexy enough.

Later, there’s another problem: everything might start to look the same. As my colleague Andrew Webster points out, this is what happens when your technology looks like AI crap. So what is Nvidia doing about it?

Damage control is underway. Ben Berraondo, director of public relations for Nvidia GeForce, quickly told my colleague Tom Warren that developers like Capcom have “detailed artistic control” over the appearance of their characters, while implying that the game developer approved the changes made to Resident Evil Requiem protagonist Grace, above.

In the meantime, Star Field Game developer Bethesda tweeted: “This is a very early preview, and our art teams will further adjust the lighting and final effect to look like what we think is best for each game. All of this will be under the control of our artists and completely optional for players.”

Here’s the pinned comment on Nvidia’s YouTube video saying pretty much the same thing:

But in an industry that simply can’t stop layoffs no matter how well games perform, people are skeptical of artists’ creative control, and journalists are willing to hear from disgruntled developers among Nvidia’s DLSS 5 partners. (BTW, my name is sean.hollister01 on Signal.)

What I want to know is: how did Nvidia not see this backlash coming, especially after previous controversies? Why didn’t he take this new technology in a completely different direction, focused on the future of gaming rather than the present?

Gamers seem less impressed with each new generation of gaming graphics. Graphics advancements don’t seem as great as they were between Super Nintendo and N64, between PS1 and PS2, between Half-life And Half-life 2. Photorealism has managed to remain elusive even in the 4K era, with many games still offering muddy graphics, rough textures, and cutscenes that look “more real” than the gameplay.

This photorealism is exactly where Nvidia’s technology seems to be taking a leap forward, and I can’t help but agree with some of it. Digital FoundryIt’s exciting when I watch their entire video at once. I also want to see a generational leap in graphic design. There is an opportunity here.

But Nvidia’s examples are killing me. No one should reconnect the faces of game characters like in the examples we saw above, whether they do it with AI or with different human actors.

It didn’t have to be this way! This same technology could have been a win for Nvidia – if they had released it for future next-gen games.

Picture this: It’s March 16, 2026, and Nvidia has one more thing to show us on the GTC 2026 stage: not a Disney robot puppeteer and a worthy AI-generated music video, but a tech demo like we’ve never seen before. It’s a brand new game that we’ve never heard of and the level of detail is incredible. Look at the water! Watch how light seems to naturally envelop these video game objects that you could practically reach out and touch! Look how you can make out every stone on this castle wall and how these characters naturally cast shadows on themselves! Look at this world filled with natural light and beautiful characters that truly belong, because they don’t conflict with the art direction of this brand new title!

Surely that required the power of an entire server to pre-render, right? No, Nvidia reveals: this is the company’s “most significant advancement in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018.”* Some would say: Wow, I would buy a new GPU or a GeForce Now subscription to play games that look like this!

_{*A real line from Nvidia’s press release.}

But the real jolt would come when Nvidia’s CEO flipped a switch to turn it on and off. Not only does this next-gen gaming demo run in real-time, but the base graphics are much more rudimentary: they don’t require investment in next-gen technology! This can build on what developers are already doing today. It’s like having a brand new graphics engine, except you can continue to use the engines you already have. Bethesda, Capcom and Ubisoft could tell us – without showing us yassified faces – that they’ve seen such excellent results applying this to existing games that they can’t wait to bring us new ones.

Unfortunately, Nvidia hasn’t decided to market the technology this way. Nvidia bundled it with DLSS, the same suite of AI-powered performance-boosting technologies that many gamers love to hate, at the same time PC gamers are reeling from Nvidia-powered AI servers creating a global RAM shortage. We’re only a year after Nvidia’s latest “fake frames” controversy, and a month after Google’s generative AI games backlash. By now, Nvidia should know more.