I'm not a PC gamer so you'd have to ask them which are the most egegious examples, but off the top of my head, Monster Hunter Wilds last year was a horribly unoptimized title that all but demanding reconstruction/frame gen/etc if you didn't have high end kit.

It's less that it's the developer's intention and more that any avenue to cut corners will inevitably end up being exploited and abused by greedy suits who don't care about quality and just want to wring out every last penny of profit.

Let's take the view though that it's about options; part of that is that when you offer people options, people are allowed to say "I don't want that, fuck off."

Monster Hunter Wilds has two things going against it, and neither has to do with depending on upscaling technologies, even indirectly. 1. Its implementation of Denuvo was particularly aggressive and inconsistent. 2. The RE Engine doesn't seem to scale well for open-world games (Dragon's Dogma 2 had similar issues.)  

Nevertheless, the reality of the matter is that if DLSS didn't exist Capcom would just depend on poorer heuristic-based methods or checker-boarding to do the upscaling. There aren't many universes where they would ditch their proprietary game engine, or the industry-standard anti-piracy DRM either. 

Upscaling existed before it was assisted by Deep-Learning/"AI" and likely would still exist in an alternative universe where CUDA wasn't invented and the DL revolution never happened. 

Anyway, I think it is fine for anyone to say "I don't want that, fuck off" just that the perspective that DLSS is being forced on anyone is an exaggeration. The only platform where DLSS is mandatory in games is the SW2 and that is a platform where it is an immense positive to the point where people question when games don't have DLSS. 

As much as i loathe Ai and the implications it brings up about the future of our society. I can't really bring my self to hate this. It's an optional feature that you can enable if you want. I see it as kind of adding graphics mods to your game like an ENB. As far as I'm aware it doesn't make any changes to in game models or anything it's just a change to the in-game lighting making it look nicer. I think it could be fun to play around with in different games.

I'm especially curious about what results we can get out of games with more cartoonish art styles. As another upside with technology like this maybe developers won't have to work as hard on having the latest cutting edge graphics. They could dedicate more time and resources towards the gameplay aspects instead.

They could probably give it a different name other than DLSS 5 as this seems to be more than just upscaling.

The thing is that it's way more than just a few. Progress seemed like it might've been slowing some for a stretch last year but in the past few months it's picked up a lot to where recently it's gotten good enough at coding that the field of coding is in the process of being revolutionized with tons of professional coders adopting it lately. In general people are increasingly using LLMs to help them do important stuff like research things, look over legal contracts and so on. It's also getting capable at cybersecurity, for example just earlier this year Mozilla partnered with Anthropic which resulted in February having twice as many Firefox bugs found compared to a usual month. 

Methods like reconstruction or frame gen effectively give those in charge an "out" to skip optimization and put the onus on players to use such technologies to get a playable experience, where in their absence they would be forced to spend more time on optimization rather than cutting corners. If you give managers and suits an out like that, it inevitably gets abused, that's just capitalism.

What worries people is things that start off an optional don't always stay that way if they become normalised and ubiquitous; people don't want a scenario where in a decade's time you can't play the new Resident Evil or Assassin's Creed without having stuff like this forced on you.

Given how much AI has been shoved down people's throats in the last few years, it's understandable that many don't like the idea of it becoming inescapable and don't trust corpos to keep it optional.

The legal stuff and others works done by AI are plagued with errors though because LLMs hallucinate and can't differentiate true from false data.

Given the flipside is deepfake revenge/child porn, rampant misinformation, a pretense for suits to lay off workers, slop infesting every corner of the internet, scams, environmental destruction, prices for RAM and stuff going through the roof, a bubble that threatens to crash the economy and more, I'd say the bad still far outweighs any good.

I don't think they would be forced to at all. For many reasons. 1. Plenty of unoptimized games existed before temporal upscalers. Hell the 7th Generation was ridden with many unoptimized AAA titles. I'd argue even more than today (although hardware was cheaper then.) 2. If a game engine is the source of performance issues it is really hard to just fix it. See how long it is taking UE5 to live up to its performance promises, as an example. An that is the largest game engine with the most resources. 3. We haven't really been seeing this abuse. Most games run as you would expect on modern hardware. The examples contrary to that, like MH:Wilds, usually have a very specific reason for their performance issues. 

Also Ray Reconstruction only makes sense if you are using ray tracing, so we are already in the enthusiast domain when we are talking about it, and it does more than just improve performance (sometimes it actually hurts performance.) Its main purpose is to improve denoising quality. And there really is no optimization trick to cleanly improve quality in the way ray reconstruction does. It is better than standard denoisers, as we've just seen with the recent Crimson Desert coverage. 

DLSS upscaling is nearing 8 years old, and it is still optional. Heck there are even more options now than in 2018, in that you can even pick specific models based on your preference. I don't see any reason that will change. It has also given options to people who didn't have them before (i.e the FuckTAA people who finally have alternatives to poor and much uglier heuristic-based TAA.) 

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree as far as the abuse of upscaling and frame gen goes as I just don't have that level of trust in execs not to exploit such an out.

The backlash to DLSS5 needs to be seen in context; for years now people have had AI forced on them by big tech, regardless of whether they wanted it or asked for it. When you show them the games they love with these hideous slop filters pasted over them, people are understandably wary that this to will in time be foisted on them too should it become normalized.

Again, it comes down to how much trust one has in these corpos. I have zero.

Hm...as someone who doesn't have anything against MLs trained for specific purposes, I don't really like DLSS5 from what I've seen so far. It changes original way too much, even if some of it might look better.

Now, if developers can train it on Ground Truth of their game in the future (I can envision something like Path Traced version of the game with 1024 or so rays cast per pixel, which GPUs can't run in real time, and then that being fed into DLSS5 as training data), then using it as a way to achieve better PT without insane hardware requirements it would otherwise require, then I'm fine with it. But if it changes overall presentation in the way it does in this examples, then I'm not really onboard with it (I'm already uneasy with how Ray Reconstruction/Regeneration in Crimson Desert is changing how game looks from Standard Denoiser, even if its for the better).

Look at the VA for her with makeup. It's very close to what dlss5 does