Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director Daniel Vávra has praised DLSS 5 again, saying the tech now looks closer to how his team originally envisioned the game's lighting and character faces. Speaking on X, he said character models that once looked flat in-engine finally read the way artists intended, closing the gap between how faces looked on artists' workstations and what actually shipped in the game. Vávra singled out shadow rendering as a big win.

He said Warhorse struggled for years to get shadows from hats, hoods, helmets, and small props like buckles and pouches to render on characters, calling it a persistent frustration during development. DLSS 5 apparently solves this, and Vávra called it an excellent upgrade to the character lighting model, though he noted it roughly halves frame rate in its current form. He also sees potential in DLSS 5 when applied to older games: "It's not the infamous AI slop we saw couple months ago.

I see huge potential here for the future, and it's absolutely great that even older games lighting could be improved this way." This is a calmer take than most of the industry's reaction to DLSS 5. A Tech Power Up reader poll found 58% of gamers don't want AI altering their games at all, and an early DLSS 5 mod for Skyrim shows how dramatically the tech can reshape faces and lighting when pushed hard. Vávra's own examples look more restrained than those comparisons.

He has defended DLSS 5 since its reveal, so this is a continuation of that stance now that he sees it applied to his own game. Warhorse is currently working on two new projects, including a Lord of the Rings RPG.