Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director defends DLSS 5: ‘No way haters will stop this’

Nvidia’s DLSS 5 hit the gaming public to much controversy—including from us here at PC Gamer. In one corner, you’ve got folks who are just seeing it as a very fancy filter analogous to AI upscaling, in the other, you’ve got Instagram filter Grace Ashcroft trotted out as a proud advancement of technology rather than an uncanny kneecap to creative intent.

The latest defender of the tech, Daniel Vávra, also happens to’ve been the director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2—though he’s now currently taking a step back from development studio Warhorse to focus on a film.

The former creative director wrote on X (thanks, PCGamesN): “I can imagine in the future devs will be able to train this tech for [a] 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. It’s way more than a soap opera effect every TV has when you turn motion smoothing on.”

Vávra’s a controversial figure, having been vocally in support of Gamergate back in 2015, rallying against “social justice warriors”, and making some tasteless jokes about the first game’s mostly-white cast.

That’s in contrast to KCD2, which seemed purposefully adverse to culture war nonsense. It featured gay romance and a more diverse setting with proportionate representation—exhaustion that Vávra, to his credit, echoes with appropriate disdain. But he’s also pro-Musk and called Canada an Orwellian country recently. So, er.

Basically, given his propensity for opinionated posting, it doesn’t surprise me that he’s hiked up his gambeson to wade into this topic, and has, in fact, talked with a sort of resigned acceptance about AI before.

As I noted in our group opinion piece on the stuff, I’m deeply cynical of the tech—partially just because of pattern recognition, most every AI promise has fallen flat, why not this one—but also because that garish, ghoulish, uncanny trailer was put forward by Nvidia.

And as much as the company wants you to believe it’s not into AI slop, its out-of-touch understanding as to what is and isn’t acceptable to its audiences strikes me more than enough cause for scepticism. I can see a small window where it might be useful—I’m certainly not complaining about AI upscaling.

But DLSS 5 is clearly more than that, and I just can’t see a future in which this tech becomes widely adopted and is, as Vávra implies, fine-tuned by devs to avoid overriding the artstyle. It’s just naive—executives will try to use this tech to cut important corners, as they have with almost every other piece of AI technology before now.

That’s if it even can be used that way: Our hardware writer, Dave James, was one of the tech’s initial defenders amongst our crew—but as he’s observed last week, DLSS 5 seems increasingly like something developers can’t even theoretically fine-tune: “The more we hear about Nvidia’s DLSS 5 feature, the worse it seems to get.”