this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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I'll likely never own a 5090 at all. Definitely not two of them.
But while a lot of you are hating how that before and after looks, the after image if just straight up nicer looking and more realistic.
It shouldn't look so realistic? Man; I'm in my 40's. Game devs have been trying to make people in games more realistic looking my entire life. Her before image wasn't less realistic due to artistic choice. It was because it couldn't be done easily or run on a system.
Lara Crofts tits didn't start as triangles for artistic reasons.
Look closely at the images, what do you notice about the face?
Darker eyebrows, more pronounced eye bags, deeper red, more pronounced, and slightly more cracked lips, and accented shading and slight tweaks to facial shape to fit more traditional beauty standards.
It's not just making it "more realistic", it's passing the artist's original intent through a filter that actually changes the way the character looks. Using the traits I described earlier, you could assume different things about the character than was intended. Darker and larger eye bags could imply worse sleep. The cracked lips could signify worse health, but the color could imply better health. The shape and shading on her face overall also changes how attractive and average/unaverage she's expected to appear in terms of looks.
Plus, when you think about how this is applied, it's not just some static application to a character model. It's effectively a full filter over your game. These traits could all change by the second as lighting or angle changes even slightly, which only makes it harder to determine the actual intended state and appearance of characters or an environment.
Things like this are visible in other images from the article, too.
For example, the older woman holding a wand. the wrinkles on her face darken and become so much more visible that you could be forgiven for thinking it was meant to be her like 5 or 10 years later, and on the image after that in the compare tool, the lighting on the dude's face entirely changes to make him more front-lit.
This is fundamentally altering the way things look from the intent of the artists and developers.
I look at the face and see one image that looks like a face from a game 5 years ago, and another that looks like that face became an actual person. You couldn't make it look like an actual person without changing some of the details from the original.
Plus, if you don't like it, it's 1 click away from just turning dlss off.
I think it could have at least done without literally plumping up her lips and changing their shape, don't you?
Sure, it looks more realistic, but it still alters how the character is intended to look within the game's environment and story.
Hell, even the entire environment just... gets brighter. You can genuinely just see more in the shadows, fog becomes less apparent, etc. This, again, alters the original artistic intent, and changes how the game appears and plays relative to the original.
I am upset because:
I am not upset because I think I personally can't disable it. I don't believe the world revolves around me, so I don't judge something's effects solely on how it will affect me and only me.
Just like motion smoothing, this will just be widespread, enabled by default, and something that claims to make things look "better", while producing odd visual artifacts and an uncanny valley effect that many people won't realize the root cause of, and will perpetually have a worse gaming experience from as a result. That is why I believe this is a problem.
I could agree, but who says that devs won't take advantage of this once it's in widespread use, and unlike motion sensing, PC gamers are very used to adjusting their settings to get the fps and look that they want. I can't even think of a PC game where one of the first things I did wasn't to go muck around in the graphics settings.