DLSS 5’s recent leak prompted modders to use the AI-powered tech to turn video game graphics hyperrealistic, to (intentionally or not) make us miss classic old-timey designs. The most recent example is Cyberpunk 2077, which shows the most nightmarish version of Night City imaginable, courtesy of the tech.
The thing about DLSS 5 in other games is that the environment never gets as oppressive as the characters. Surviving one trip into a DLSS 5-infested world only requires players to look away regularly, perhaps at the sky, for a nice little breather. That won’t work here: the characters, vehicles, and terrain all look incredibly grotesque, and so does the sky.
Interestingly, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel that inspired most of what we know as the cyberpunk genre, begins with the famous line, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Nowadays, a dead channel is a completely different thing than what it was when the novel was written, but it’s just as we see it in the DLSS 5-ified Cyberpunk 2077, a near-fluorescent grey that’ll make you want to turn off the TV.
When the first Cyberpunk 2077 promotional materials started rolling out, Gibson criticized the game’s vivid colors for making the supposedly grim reality of a technological dystopia seem too fun and welcoming. Understandable, though I seriously doubt he or anyone could push through even the starting portion of the game under those conditions. Maybe that’s why the devs ended up going with what Gibson more or less shrugged off as a GTA clone with an ’80s retro-future mod.
And this might be the most egregious use case of DLSS 5 up until now, but pretty much every one I’ve come across has been the stuff of nightmares for one reason or another, and most players seem to agree. That shouldn’t read as a challenge to produce something even worse, just the acknowledgment that it could still arrive.
