This week, one of the biggest talking points on the gaming internet has once again been NVIDIA’s technology: DLSS 5.

If you do not know what it is, look it up, because I am not going to explain it here. Today I want to talk about the controversy and, above all, the hypocrisy it is exposing.

I am not talking about NVIDIA’s demos

Let us be clear about which images I mean: the community experiments following the leak of a DLL from the new NBA 2K27, not NVIDIA’s official demonstrations.

By late August, there were already reports of experimental use in Control. Community tools such as DLSS5-Feeder and DLSS 5 Bridge have since emerged to bring that rendering to other games, including through approximate inputs where there is no native integration.

Is an image produced that way the same as the result of an official integration chosen and tuned by that game’s developers? No.

And those hideous images I am talking about? They are the result of the community applying the tool. In terms of who decides to modify the game, it is no different from installing a mod or using an editing tool to alter an image or video. It is not an artistic decision made by the studio.

DIY outrage: modify it yourself, then get angry

And this part of the controversy could hardly seem more absurd and ridiculous to me.

A tool leaks ahead of its official release. Parts of the community apply it however they like, to games that were not designed for that use, and those results then become grounds for declaring video games dead.

That is the hypocrisy: treating a community modification as something imposed by the industry. Whoever chose to apply the tool, and under what conditions, disappears from the story. But the ugliest screenshot stays, ready to fuel the outrage.

As I always say, complaining is fashionable. But this week has been surreal even by those standards.

If a major company released a game with an official integration and the result was disastrous, I could absolutely understand a controversy about that result. But bloody hell… in the cases I am talking about, people are manufacturing their own outrage.

Apparently, it is the end of video games. Again. Because for plenty of content creators, everything is anti-consumer and everything spells the end of the industry as we know it. Playing to the crowd and picking up a couple of easy likes looks good, though.

I am not saying that a tool is beyond criticism because it is experimental. I am saying that getting it to run by whatever means in whatever game does not turn the result into a demonstration of how every studio will use it.

My personal opinion on this controversy is easy to sum up: absurd and manufactured. A textbook case for /ignore.

And what do I think of the technology?

For one thing, I think using the DLSS name was a mistake. I would have preferred a separate name, with both technologies continuing to develop along their own paths.

For another, my impression from what I have seen so far is that it only fits artistic approaches aiming for hyperrealism. We will see whether future iterations make it a sensible choice for other visual styles. More realistic does not automatically mean better, let alone more faithful to a game’s artistic intent.

It is just another tool for developers, alongside the countless tools available for all sorts of tasks. Anyone who thinks it improves some aspect of their product will use it. Anyone who does not will ignore it.

I do not need to defend NVIDIA or endorse its technology to reject a controversy built around unofficial implementations. One does not imply the other.

Zero marks for the controversy. Zero for DLSS 5 too: it still has everything to prove.