Developers Escalate DLSS 5 Backlash
“Cripple their sales, tank their stock price.” That’s not a Reddit rant—it’s Dave Oshry, CEO of boomer-shooter publisher New Blood Interactive, calling for a full-on boycott of Nvidia over DLSS 5. He wants developers to stop collaborating and players to stop buying until the company rethinks its approach. “Then maybe they’ll think about going back to giving us what we want,” he told PC Gamer.
DLSS 5 has been under fire for a week over what many see as a generative AI filter masking as image quality. Nvidia has tried to frame it as “generative upscaling at the geometry layer,” not simple post-processing. The explanation hasn’t soothed critics, especially after screenshots and clips—like the hyper-smoothed, “yassified” look of Resident Evil Requiem’s Grace—spread across feeds and forums.
“Push Back Like We Did With NFTs”
Oshry argues this fight goes beyond typical forum outrage. “We as developers and players need to push back against this bullshit just like we did with NFTs and crypto games and try in vain to do with predatory micro transactions, loot boxes and battle passes,” he said, adding that DLSS 5 is “fundamentally changing the way video games look based on artificial intelligence that’s been trained on Instagram models and Epstein memes.” Nvidia hasn’t disclosed the data it used to train the system, which leaves a vacuum critics are more than willing to fill.
His tone mixed sarcasm with frustration. “You used to have to spend hours poorly modding your games to make them look this ‘cinematic’, and now Nvidia is going to let you do it for free! Just kidding, it’ll cost like $5,000.” Oshry also stressed he isn’t speaking as a vendor dependent on the tech. Only one New Blood game uses DLSS, he said, calling the integration a “huge pain in the ass,” and claiming he has no “dog in this fight” beyond being a PC player who cares about how games look.
Artistic Intent vs. “Slop Filter”
David Szymanski, creator of Dusk, tied the furor to a broader fatigue with sideways “lateral” rendering improvements while GPUs themselves get pricier. “It especially sucks seeing it showcased in Resident Evil Requiem,” he told PC Gamer, praising the game as an example of AAA craft. “Seeing Grace and Leon getting run through the slop filter as a ‘victory lap’ definitely feels like insult and injury combined into one.”
The strongest criticism zeroes in on authorship. “Nobody wants a fucking glorified autocorrect painting over the work of actual human beings making actual art,” Szymanski said. Oshry took the worry a step further: “At this rate, why make game art at all? Why not just draw some shapes and colors and let AI generate what it thinks it should look like?” The fear isn’t just about softness, halos, or plastic skin; it’s about AI systems overriding the intent of the people who built the scene in the first place.
Others in the indie space echoed the sentiment and amplified Oshry’s post across social platforms. The message: don’t just dunk on screenshots—apply economic pressure.
Nvidia, for its part, has spent the past week insisting DLSS 5 is more sophisticated than a filter and operates earlier in the frame pipeline. After that push, the company appears ready to move on, but the community isn’t. The unanswered training-data question lingers, and there’s still confusion over how much control players and developers will have to dial the effect back without losing performance.
Will A Boycott Change Anything?
Oshry’s ask is clear: hit Nvidia in the wallet until it rethinks how DLSS 5 shapes a game’s image. If enough studios refuse to integrate the feature—or ship with it off by default—the marketing shine around “free performance” could dull. Players, meanwhile, can send a signal by skipping new cards or by turning off features that don’t respect the art direction.
Whether that happens at scale is another question. Nvidia’s hardware dominance makes coordinated pushback hard, but not impossible—especially if more high-profile developers publicly balk at DLSS 5’s look. A credible off-ramp would help: real transparency about training data, firm assurances about preserving art direction, and granular per-game controls. If Nvidia wants buy-in, it needs to earn trust on how this tech is built and where it’s going.
Boycotts rarely flip a switch overnight. They can, however, force conversations that companies would rather avoid. If the DLSS 5 debate keeps centering the artists behind these games—and the players who notice when something feels off—this won’t fade with the next driver update.
