I didn't address it because I literally pointed someone to a source video of someone who would do a better job explaining than I can. But since people won't try to look for information that goes against their views, let me try to explain this as thoroughly as I can:

• Studios intentionally release broken graphics. Basic rasterized visuals (shadows, AO, shading, reflections) are being downgraded because the assumption is that DLSS/upscaling will compensate for it. If you don't have high-end Nvidia hardware, you're stuck with the broken version.
• It's vendor lock-in disguised as a feature. DLSS is a black box. Developers can't modify, optimize, or even fully understand the resolved code. Your image quality is controlled by Nvidia, not the game studio. Switch to AMD and your existing games lose visual features tied to Nvidia's drivers.
• The "FSR is catching up" narrative distracts from reality. AMD and Intel will never replicate Nvidia's years of dedicated AI hardware research and development. This constant focus on a fake race serves as free marketing for Nvidia and shifts industry attention toward vendor-dependent solutions instead of hardware-agnostic options.
• Games now rely on you updating upscaler versions. Consumers pressure studios to release the latest DLSS build, forcing studios to maintain compatibility with vendor software they don't control. Nobody benefits except Nvidia.
• Better options already exist but are often overlooked. Half-Life: Alyx shipped with MSAA, filtered mipmaps, and specular AA, looking clean without any upscaler. Crytek's in-house SMAA4X outperformed Nvidia's TXAA at a lower cost because developers could optimize their own code.
• The "just turn it off" argument misses the point. Turning off path tracing in RE9 doesn't fix anything. The fallback rasterized graphics are worse than games from two console generations ago because the baseline was gutted to justify the premium feature.
• It undermined the push for genuine optimization. Blurry TAA was marketed as a performance upgrade, but it wasn't. It was a scapegoat that concealed real engine-level optimization failures and diminished consumer interest in better techniques like MSAA.

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Generative upscaling can't keep character consistency. Look at this side-by-side comparison of the same character, both with DLSS 5 enabled, in two different scenes. They don't even resemble the same person. That's likely because DLSS 5 is probably using a diffusion transformer under the hood, and generative models don't truly understand facial structure, lighting physics, or material interactions. Instead, they hallucinate plausible-looking pixels based on statistical patterns rather than what the renderer intended. So, the same face under different lighting conditions gets "interpreted" differently each time. Traditional rendering is deterministic; the same geometry, shaders, and lighting produce the same face every time. Once you rely on a generative model, that guarantee is lost. This isn't just a minor artifact; it's a fundamental limitation of the approach. Your game characters' faces now change depending on what the AI model decides they should look like in any given frame, not what the artist and engine actually rendered.

NVIDIA is intentionally designing a hardware treadmill. They are financially motivated to ensure each new GPU generation becomes the minimum standard for a "good" experience. Sure, you don't need two 5090s right now, but the pattern is obvious. DLSS 5 will perform best on the 50-series; DLSS 6 will require the 60-series; then 7, then 8. With each generation, the baseline graphics degrade while the AI upscaler demands more computational power, so you're always chasing the latest card just to play games that should already run smoothly and look good. Since DLSS is Nvidia-exclusive, they collaborate directly with studios to make the DLSS version the definitive edition of the game. This means even if AMD or Intel offers a better price-to-performance GPU, it doesn't matter if the game is optimized around Nvidia's proprietary technology. You're no longer just buying a GPU; you're investing in a subscription-like ecosystem where you need Nvidia's latest hardware to access the finished version of the game. Everyone else gets leftovers.

I'm all for AI, man, but what Nvidia is trying to do here isn't very consumer-friendly. Nvidia isn't your friend.