In this Weekends With Avrona, I basically had to sit down and say it out loud: DLSS 5 looks like a disaster. DLSS used to be something I could tolerate because, at its best, it was a solid performance tool—upscaling got genuinely impressive, frame gen was “fake frames” but still free performance in the right games, and ray reconstruction at least aimed at improving image quality. But DLSS 5 is trying to “improve” games by pushing this AI-photorealistic filter vibe, and the results look uncanny, over-sharpened, and sometimes straight-up wrong. I go through Nvidia’s own examples (Resident Evil, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, FIFA) and point out how it can destroy lighting, flatten shadows, add weird sheen, and even make faces look less believable while technically adding “detail.” The biggest takeaway: this doesn’t behave like some smart, engine-aware upgrade. After Nvidia got pressed for details, it turns out DLSS 5 is basically a 2D filter applied to the final frame—no real 3D understanding of the scene—so a lot of the ugliness suddenly makes sense. Then I pivot into something I didn’t expect to praise: Microsoft. They’ve publicly acknowledged Windows quality issues and laid out plans to reduce Copilot clutter, make updates less obnoxious, and fix File Explorer performance. It’s wild that Microsoft is sounding more reasonable than Nvidia right now, but here we are.