The GTC 2026 reveal received plenty of praise from tech veterans who watched the in-person demo, including Digital Foundry and Ryan Shrout, as well as calm words from Nvidia and studios like Bethesda.
That did not stop the loud anti-AI crowd branding it “just an AI filter” and “disrespectful of the developer’s original design”, as if lighting had never changed a scene before.
Now Avalanche Software, veteran game artist Georgian Avasilcutei has waded in on the side of DLSS 5.
Avasilcutei has credits across Remember Me and Life is Strange at DONTNOD, Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider at Arkane and Hogwarts Legacy, so he has shipped plenty of pixels.
He says the critics are misunderstanding what DLSS 5 is doing, framing it as a generative prompt toy rather than as a reconstruction model that leans on the game’s own data.
Avasilcutei said: “After this whole debate about DLSS 5, I came to the conclusion that most of the people talking about it are completely unaware of what they don’t know… they’re on the peak of ignorance and don’t even grasp how little they understand. They just heard generative AI, and like Pavlov’s dog, they just start drooling, thinking it’s the same shit as unethical slop image generators… for the love of Christ… go and educate yourself before raging on the internet for no reason.
He said that DLLS 5 is not a prompt-based generator… It’s not creating stuff based on someone else’s images and hallucinating results. It uses the information from the raster to build up a final render frame with the same information but with better lighting and shading.
“I’ll even give you an example on how much of an impact better shading and lighting has. This is a character I’ve worked on not long ago. On the left, you have a raster render with some bad shaders. On the right, you have a render with ray tracing on, a much better shader for both hair and skin. They don’t even look like the same person…do they? This is what DLSS 5 is doing… getting a result like the one on the right (tbh, a lot better) at a lower cost than rendering it. Still the same geo, same textures, same light sources,” Avasilcutei said.
“Some of you will say the image on the left is better, and that it’s the artist’s vision. It’s not…it’s just the artist’s limitation due to shading and lighting constraints. Every single artist out there would love to get the right result in real time.”
Faces shift under different lighting, shaders and exposure, and anyone claiming “vision” often means “what the frame time allowed”.
To really drive it home, he posted a side-by-side of a character with basic raster lighting versus ray-traced lighting and upgraded hair and skin shaders.
He even slapped up a Dunning–Kruger meme, planting most DLSS 5 hot takes on “Mount Stupid”, which is harsh but not exactly rare online.
The broader argument is familiar to anyone who has worked with lighting in games, film, or photography, where the craft is often about flattering the subject and hiding the ugly bits.
DLSS 5’s critics still want it treated like a generator that invents new assets, while its defenders keep insisting it is a developer-controlled tool for better shading and lighting.
