Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director sticks up for NVIDIA's DLSS 5 AI tech, says "This is just a little uncanny beginning" — "No way haters will stop this"

NVIDIA's latest upcoming version of its Super Resolution software DLSS 5 was announced last week, and the reveal ended up being one of the hottest stories in gaming for all the wrong reasons. The graphics and AI-focused company showed how the tech uses generative AI in an effort to enhance in-game scenes with photorealistic lighting.

What it was hoping would be a slam dunk that got people hyped for its release later this fall, however, was instead something of a disaster. Gamers and devs alike were shocked by how DLSS 5 made characters look like they were passed over by an uncanny AI slop filter, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang only made things worse by telling consumers "they're completely wrong." He later backpedaled.

The overall backlash against DLSS 5 has been enormous, and despite Huang's clarifications that it doesn't touch model geometry or textures and can be fully controlled and finely tuned by developers, some remain skeptical at best and doubt the truthfulness of those statements at worst.

Others, though, believe that while DLSS 5 had a poor first showing, the tech is still very much going to catch on and become popular, especially as developers adopt it and tweak it to achieve the visual enhancements that they want. Among them is Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director Daniel Vávra, who's spoken up in defense of the software.

"I can imagine in the future devs will be able to train this tech for particular art style or specific people faces and it might replace expensive raytracing etc. This is just a little uncanny beginning. No way haters will stop this. Its way more than a soap opera effect every tv has when you turn motion smoothing on," he said in a post on social media.

Vávra has previously spoken of generative AI with resigned acceptance, noting that while he's "no fan of AI-generated art," he believes it's not going anywhere, and that "it's time to face reality." At the time, Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios was being widely criticized for using AI to generate art references for its concept artists as they worked on the upcoming RPG Divinity. In response to the heat, Larian stopped using AI for ideation.

I'm not one to get happy about anything AI related succeeding, mind you, but honestly? I think Vávra is right in this case. DLSS 5 may look pretty bad with character faces, but in the examples and comparisons we've seen, it's made some pretty impressive-looking changes to environments.

The 12-minute gameplay footage of DLSS 5-enhanced Starfield that Vávra was quote-reposting serves as a great example of this. Xbox and Bethesda's 2023 RPG is somewhat notorious for having flat lighting in a lot of its "normal" areas that lack dramatic lighting, but DLSS 5 brought a lot of natural depth to it, and made it pop.

Therefore, I do believe that we're going to see developers support and engage with DLSS 5, aiming to capitalize on its potential by tailoring its outputs to suit the look and style of their games without pushing things into uncanny valley territory as NVIDIA's demo did.

In the end, I would be okay with that, provided that developers retain the ability to fully control how DLSS 5 affects the look of their projects in their official vanilla versions. Creative control should always remain with a game's creators.

🗨️ Do you agree with Vávra's comments?

I don't always find myself agreeing with Daniel Vávra's opinions — and he's pretty opinionated — but I do believe he's right in this case. Despite how horrifically it messes with character faces, DLSS 5 does show potential, and I think it's something devs will want to capitalize on.

How about you, though? Do you agree with Daniel Vávra, or do you think he's wrong and that DLSS 5 won't catch on? Let me know in the comments, and vote in our poll.

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