The “sculpted reference” comparison seems misleading. A sculpt/render reference is normally shown under controlled, fixed presentation lighting designed to make the facial forms readable. A game character has to work under the actual scene lighting, shadows, materials and exposure. And this is CryEngine 5. the it has a perfectly capable real-time lighting/shadowing pipeline. We don't need to compare the face to some idealized sculpt render; compare it to the lighting information already present in the game frame. If that dark region isn't helmet shadow, that actually makes the discrepancy more obvious. There is visible illumination on the helmet, parts of the face and the shoulder on that same side. “The normals are fucked” can explain an incorrect surface response, but then you're acknowledging that the resulting facial shading is incorrect and not demonstrating that DLSS reconstructed it correctly. That's the actual criticism: not “make it look like the sculpt,” but keep the reconstructed face coherent with the lighting of the scene it's standing in.