I do fear that graphics are all that will be talked about over the next few years - especially if it becomes an official marketing angle, when if you actually watch the footage, it doesn't look realistic at all.
Look at just the first half-second of this clip focussed on how amazing DLSS 5 is...
You can buff the faces all you like, but if the ball moves like a bullet, stops on a dime and requires no control, you wouldn't confuse this with a clip from real-life would you?
(Yes this is a clip from a modded FC26 but unfortunately it's the same in FC27.)
No amount of DLSS5 can make those ugly grass look alright in FIFA 23 onwards. Something about these games look straight up ugly. Yeah the faces itself look better but good lord the rest of the image is a mess.
Speaking of DLSS5, it will be interested to improve the graphics of older games, but the ramifications of DLSS5 would be disastrous. If there's one thing I've learnt in the past couple of years, developers will use any new feature as a crutch instead of further pushing the visuals. What DLSS5 will result in is devs putting no effort on face models and rendering them in correct lighting and then expecting users to just use DLSS5 to have good looking face with better lights. And you've already seen how much performance loss is there with DLSS5.
DLSS5 is also vendor locked feature. And these things will eventually break or loose support and require 3rd party hacks/ piss poor emulation that runs even worse- look at what happened to cuda32 and physx32 bit support. It was dropped and games with physx32 became unplayable unless you disabled it. Later on Nvidia added driver level emulation for "some" games and even there it's riddled with stutters and mediocre performance even if there's improvment.
Look at Fox Engine PES games. They already had near photorealistic face models. Heck, Metal Gear Solid V had photorealistic face rendering and that thing ran even on Xbox 360 and Ps3 and face rendering looked impressive even on that console. We also had games like Batman Arkham Knight and Rise of Tomb Raider where facial rendering looked incredible and those ran on Ps4, over a decade old hardware at this point.
And last but not the least, like all of the DLSS features- it's temporal based. And this results in awful ghosting and motion artifacts, you can easily see the ghosting on DLSS5. On some games the ghosting is less noticeable due not having complex environments but on others its a ghosting fest on motion. Same problem is there with TAA too and current PS5 era FIFA games all suffer from this awful TAA smear. FSR and DLAA improves the smearing but it's still there and there are still occlusion artifacts. Games now look blurrier than older games that had MSAA or even just piss poor fxaa [eg: Resident Evil 6].
So yeah, while DLSS5 will be really interesting in breathing some visual leap on older footie games, the future is truly dark. And will remain dark until things get better, if things ever get better. Considering the current pricing, I feel like they are trying to destroy PC and physical console market and trying to force cloud gaming onto us. The ghost of Google Stadia strikes back. Good luck modding games and owning anything when cloud gaming replaces regular gaming.
/End of rant. Apologies for being negative but I don't feel like this is overthinking.
