Nvidia's new DLSS 5 sparks backlash among fans and makes characters look very different – one in particular like Will Neff.
The Twitch streamer and YouTuber Will Neff is shocked after discovering that one Elder Scrolls IV character now looks like him with Nvidia's new controversial DLSS 5 graphics.
What Is The DLSS 5?
Nvidia recently revealed the NVIDIA DLSS 5, claiming it to be the company’s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018.
NVIDIA DLSS was first released in 2018 as an AI technology to boost performance. First it only upscaled the resolution, later it generated entirely new frames.
The DLSS 5 now introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials. It is supposed to make graphics sharper and more realistic, enabling developers to make visuals "previously only achieved in Hollywood visual effects." Nvidia showed off DLSS 5 at GDC this week, scheduled to come later this year to the RTX 50s-series GPUs.
More specifically, it uses a game's color and motion vectors to create photoreal lighting and materials for the screen with the help of an AI model.
The AI model is trained end to end to understand complex scene semantics such as characters, hair, fabric and translucent skin, along with environmental lighting conditions like front-lit, back-lit or overcast — all by analyzing a single frame. DLSS 5 then uses its deep understanding to generate visually precise images that handle complex elements such as subsurface scattering on skin, the delicate sheen of fabric and light-material interactions on hair, all while retaining the structure and semantics of the original scene.
People Hate It
Although some people think the DLSS 5 is a step in the right direction and that it makes games look better, many don't like how it makes characters look. The reveal sparked a lot of backlash because of its AI visuals.
Many fans think it looks like an AI filter or a "bad ad for a mobile game that you get while scrolling YouTube." The characters don't really look like themselves anymore, as small differences in the shape of a nose or eye can make a huge difference in the similarity and recognizability in something as precise as a human face. People seem to get "uncanny-valley" vibes from the new characters.
What the critics dislike most though is not only that the DLSS 5 changes the characters, it is the way in which it changes them. Nvidia claims it uses source material to refine lighting but it does much more than that: It gives characters fuller lips, more facial hair, more defined cheekbones and sometimes even slightly different colored hair. Some say they look like they have some kind of instagram filter on. Others call it a "yassification." At least it makes for some good memes.
DLSS 5 OFF / ON pic.twitter.com/eVVA3Epgv5
— Maddox (@realmaddox) March 16, 2026
Will Neff's Twin
But the changing and photorealism of the games' graphics also has another side effect: As characters start to look like real humans, they also start to look like real people, as Twitch streamer and YouTuber Will Neff discovers when he sees the new rendition of an Elder Scrolls IV character and feels like he's looking in a mirror. He posts the video of the Character on X, saying "Yo im finna sue someone over this [stuff]. That’s MY FACE!?!"
DLSS 5 looks uncanny
— NikTek (@NikTek) March 16, 2026
This footage wasn't even recorded in-game, it was captured from a monitor so I would suspect that the artifacts are much more noticeable in motion pic.twitter.com/shrYix1bNK
Nvidia's Response
At a press Q&A, the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells Tom's Hardware that the criticism of the new tech is "wrong".
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.
Developers can still conroll the work artistically und fine tune the AI, he states.
Bethesda also posted on X that this reveal was very early and they were still working on the final project to adjust everything.
Appreciate your excitement and analysis of the new DLSS 5 lighting here. This is a very early look, and our art teams will be further adjusting the lighting and final effect to look the way we think works best for each game. This will all be under our artists' control, and...
— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) March 16, 2026
While the option to be able to control the AI and its usage makes the whole thing a little better, that was not the main critique. The main backlash is about the aesthetic. The characters look like AI-slop renditions with Instagram filters and some don't even look like themselves anymore. But the CLSS 5 is not released yet, so we can not know what it will actually look like in the end. For that we will still have to wait a few months and hope Nvidia learned from its fans' reactions.
