- Kingdom Come: Deliverance's creative director has defended Nvidia's DLSS 5 amid the ongoing backlash.
- Daniel Vavra shared a comparison on X, saying DLSS 5 restores the "original artistic vision" for the first KCD.
- The director also compared DLSS 5’s AI model to ZBrush and called out players dismissing the technology as “AI slop.”
Players have been extremely vocal about Nvidia DLSS 5 ever since its initial reveal in March earlier this year, which Jensen Huang calls “the GPT moment for graphics.” However, a prominent video game figure has joined the debate between players and DLSS 5 on the AI’s side. The creative director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Daniel Vavra, has defended the power of DLSS 5 in gaming.
KCD Dev Daniel Vavra Says DLSS 5 Restores The “Original Artistic Vision”
Daniel Vavra’s DLSS 5 defense on X came with a comparison showing a specific character model rendered with the game’s original lighting and with DLSS 5 enabled. According to him, KCD’s limited lighting system couldn’t render lighting, textures, and shadows as originally intended, while DLSS 5 improves all three.
“On the right is THE SAME MODEL WITHOUT ANY GEOMETRY CHANGES, which looks exactly like a render from ZBrush—where a 3D artist modeled it—only with better lighting, shadows, skin texture, hair, and therefore DETAILS. Thanks to neural network rendering in DLSS5,” said Vavra in his post.
Of course, the KCD dev didn’t pass up an opportunity to call out players who term DLSS 5 “AI slop,” saying, “Some random nutcase on the internet [says]: THIS IS AI SLOP! I WANT THE ORIGINAL ARTISTIC VISION!”
Vavra says DLSS 5 brings out the original artistic vision Warhorse had with the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance, comparing it with ZBrush and stating, “This is our original artistic vision and looks like static renders of the models from ZBrush when we made them.”
“Having no shadows from helmets on faces and f****d up normal map rendering WAS NOT OUR ORIGINAL ARTISTIC VISION. People are crazy,” concluded Vavra.
In another X post by Vavra, he talked about being annoyed by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, saying “You have no idea how terribly—and I mean really, really—annoyed I was that in KCD2 we couldn’t render shadows from hats, hoods, and helmets on characters’ heads, or even shadows from small details on character models (buckles, laces, pouches)”.
He commended DLSS 5, saying it improves KCD 2 “absolutely brilliantly!” However, he did admit the frame-rate issues with DLSS 5, but still concluded: “I see huge potential here for the future, and it’s absolutely great that even older games’ lighting could be improved this way.”
Back in July, Nvidia’s DLSS 5 showcase at the SIGGRAPH 2026 keynote also received immense backlash from players, with many users pointing out that it feels like an “AI filter”, so these two X posts explain why Vavra said people are going crazy over DLSS 5.
While the creative director left Warhorse Studios earlier this year, the upcoming Kingdom Come title and Lord of the Rings RPG could still use AI to cut costs. This follows reports that the studio fired a Czech-to-English translator in March and replaced them with AI, suggesting that Warhorse isn’t opposed to gen AI.
