Vávra Praises DLSS 5 Shadows in Kingdom Come 2, Despite 50% Frame-Rate Hit

Q: Why is the director of Kingdom Come 2 praising a controversial AI tech that slashes game performance in half?

Daniel Vávra is praising DLSS 5 because, in his view, it fixes visual problems that Warhorse could not fully solve with the game’s existing lighting pipeline, even if the current cost is too high for practical play. His main argument is artistic, not technical marketing. He says DLSS 5 brings *Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2* closer to the studio’s original intent by improving how light interacts with faces, skin, hair, fabrics, and small geometry details. He has pointed to shadows from hats, hoods, helmets, buckles, laces, and pouches—details that he says were frustratingly hard to render convincingly in the shipped game. With DLSS 5, those contact shadows and facial shading look more like what artists saw on their development workstations. That is also why he rejects the idea that the feature is simply “AI slop.” Based on his tests, he says it is not changing character geometry or redesigning faces, but refining lighting, ambient occlusion, and material response using the existing assets. In restrained settings, that aligns with NVIDIA’s pitch that developers can tune intensity and preserve artistic control. The tradeoff is severe. Vávra openly says frame rates are cut roughly in half, which matches many early unofficial tests. So his praise is not a claim that DLSS 5 is ready for mainstream use today. It is a claim that the image-quality upside is real enough to justify optimism, especially for future hardware, better optimization, and even possible upgrades to older games.

3 articles · Updated · techpowerup.com · Aug 30

Daniel Vávra said DLSS 5 makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s lighting and character faces look closer to Warhorse’s original intent, especially in shadow detail.
Warhorse had struggled for years to render shadows from hats, hoods, helmets and small props on characters, and Vávra said DLSS 5 finally fixes that gap between artists’ workstations and the shipped game.
He still acknowledged a steep cost: the current implementation roughly halves frame rate, limiting its appeal even as he called it an excellent upgrade to the character lighting model.
Vávra also argued the tech could improve older games, though debate remains sharp—58% of respondents in a TechPowerUp poll said they do not want AI altering games at all.