At a press Q&A with Tom's Hardware at GTC 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang downplayed criticism of DLSS 5, the company's new use of AI and neural rendering to infer how certain features of games would look if they were more photorealistic.
"Since DLSS 5 was revealed yesterday, there's been a pretty vocal response from some of the gaming community that the technology appears to make games appear worse, homogenous, or show only NVIDIA's view of how games should look. How do you feel about that criticism?' asked Tom's Hardware editor-in-chief Paul Alcorn.
"Well, first of all, they're completely wrong," Huang said in response. "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 continued.
He added that developers can still "fine-tune the generative AI" to make it match their style, adding that DLSS 5 adds generative capability to the existing geometry of the game, but that it "doesn't change the artistic control."
"It’s not post-processing, it’s not post-processing at the frame level, it’s generative control at the geometry level," he said.
Huang also said that developers can try the tool and see how they want to use it, suggesting that it's up to a developer to try to make a "toon shader" or see if the game should be "made of glass."
"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."
We'll see if the vocal gamers who say they dislike what they see change their mind as we see more. DLSS 5 is set to launch in the fall, and there will likely be far more demos of this technology that are more fully baked before then.
Update 3/19/2026 4:38pm PT: Added full text of question to Jensen.
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