Nvidia’s upcoming DLSS 5 technology has received positive feedback from Daniel Vávra, director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, after he tested a leaked version of the technology in the role-playing game. Vávra said the technology helped the game achieve visual results closer to the development team’s original intentions, particularly in areas such as shadows, skin textures and facial details. His comments provide an early response from a game director who has directly tested the technology in his own title, as DLSS 5 continues to generate discussion over how artificial intelligence based rendering could affect the appearance of existing games.
According to Vávra, one of the most noticeable improvements from DLSS 5 comes from the way it handles lighting and shadows. He explained that Kingdom Come: Deliverance II originally had limitations in its lighting model that prevented certain visual details from appearing as intended. The leaked DLSS 5 implementation appears to address some of these limitations by using existing information from the game to produce additional visual detail. Vávra specifically pointed to character heads and facial rendering as examples, saying the technology can make skin textures and facial details appear closer to the original vision. The system does not appear to alter the underlying geometry or character models, meaning the improvements are being produced through rendering rather than by replacing the game’s existing models.
The reaction is particularly notable because DLSS 5 has attracted mixed responses since examples of the technology began circulating. Unlike earlier versions of Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling technology, the new system places greater emphasis on artificial intelligence based visual enhancement and neural rendering. The leaked version has been tested by users across different games, with results varying depending on the title and the way the technology is applied. Some tests have shown improvements in lighting, textures, facial details and shadows, while other demonstrations have produced visual changes that some players consider unnatural. The technology has also been tested outside its intended hardware and software environment by modders, although these unofficial implementations do not represent Nvidia’s final supported release.
For Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Vávra’s assessment suggests that DLSS 5 can potentially address visual limitations that developers were unable to completely solve through conventional rendering techniques. His comments also distinguish the technology from concerns that artificial intelligence based rendering necessarily changes the artistic direction of a game. In his testing, the technology worked with existing game information and helped produce details that were closer to what the development team had originally intended. DLSS 5 is expected to receive further refinement before its official release, so the leaked version tested in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II should not necessarily be considered representative of the final implementation. Nvidia has already been developing newer DLSS technologies that use artificial intelligence to improve image quality, with DLSS 4.5 introducing a second generation Transformer model for Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction. The DLSS 5 experiments therefore represent another stage in Nvidia’s effort to use neural rendering techniques to improve visual quality while games continue to rely on existing assets and rendering systems.
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