NVIDIA's DLSS 5 AI upscaler is catching a lot of flack from gamers, but developers like Warhorse's Daniel Vavra praise the new technology.
Thanks to the most recent DLSS 5 leak, there are tons of AI-altered images of popular games floating around the internet. Cloud Strife looks like Kate McKinnon in an SNL sketch, everyone in Skyrim became beautiful, Miranda Keys from Halo 2 gets a soap opera filter, and even Joel's daughter Sarah from The Last of Us looks a little bit like a grown Steve Buscemi.
While DLSS 5 is mostly being lampooned by players, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 developer Daniel Vavra sees real promise in the visual tech. The Warhorse Studios boss recently spoke out on DLSS 5 on Twitter, saying that it enabled visuals that were much closer to the team's original artistic vision for the game--especially when it comes to shadows and lighting.
Vavra shared some images that are much more muted and scaled-back than other DLSS 5 images; the most shocking pictures will often scale DLSS 5 to its maximum settings across multiple parameters, creating visuals that seem to vary significantly from the original source's tone and color schemes.
With DLSS 5, Vavra says, the differences between the high-end visuals that modelers and developers see on their expensive computers can now better match the finalized image that users see in-game.
"I often criticized the character artists' work when certain faces in the game looked lacking in detail and plasticity, and they'd often show me that it looked fine on their computers and that the problem was with the lighting in the game. Well, now it looks right in the game, too! This is how those faces were supposed to look. The AI isn't making anything up."
Shadow rendering is also a major area where Vavra sees DLSS 5 doing heavy lifting, solving a maddening problem that plagued the devs at the start:
"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). DLSS5 does this, and it does it absolutely brilliantly!"
"For me, this is primarily an excellent photorealistic upgrade to the character lighting model. The "minor" issue is that it cuts the frame rate in half :)"
Warhorse is currently working on two new projects, including a Lord of the Rings RPG, as well as another project set in the Kingdom Come universe.
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