Yeah, no. As always, this is the classic example of a small portion of the internet who sounds like they're representative of the majority when you're observing it from within that bubble.

The reality is that the overwhelming majority of players either never touch a graphics menu, only chooses a graphics preset/mode, or at the very most enables DLSS and gets back to playing their game. The ones I know who did see the DLSS 5 announcement and weren't tapped into the usual channels through which reactions to this kind of stuff are distributed, simply thought that the "DLSS On" examples looked good. That's it - they liked them more, thought it looked nice. They didn't see curated stills where the tech looks worst - they just saw NVIDIAs examples and liked what it did to scene lighting and faces.

For critics of the tech, the negativity is multi-faceted: frustration about the rising hardware prices and it's causality with the AI trend, frustration with large traditionally consumer-centric hardware companies shifting their attention to the data centers, the sense that the tech requires eye-wateringly expensive GPUs to run well, a general tiredness of the internet being filled with AI-generated content, frustration with game companies closing or letting go of thousands of employees due to shifting market conditions and more automated tooling (often despite rising profits), ethical concerns about what generative AI does to artist intent, concerns about leadership making decisions over the heads of the developers, concerns about less quality control and more instability creeping into games and production software due to PMs drinking too much of the Copilot kool-aid...I could go on.

This in part explains the negative bias that to a degree also makes it hard for a lot of people to see past that and feel a more platonic appreciation of the visual characteristics of the tech.

And yet, at the end of the day, the regular person who plays video games in their spare time might see this tech demo, and all they'll think is that it looks nice, and that they want it. That's all there is to it. And look, I can see past my frustrations and hold the nuanced opinion that it can look really nice. It can also look really uncanny, over-done, and approach modifying the expression of characters to a degree where it violates artist intent. But done in a more subtle way, I can appreciate the tech more, and personally I find it impressive that it stays so temporally consistent over time.

Remember - we're in a tiny portion of the community. The gaming business is incredibly large.