Kingdom Come 2 Director Defends DLSS 5 Character Lighting

Daniel Vávra, who directed Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, says DLSS 5 brings the game’s characters closer to the look its artists intended. His defense comes with a caveat: he was experimenting with a leaked version, and he says it halved the frame rate in his test.

Vávra shared his impressions and comparison images on X on August 30. PC Gamer covered his comments on September 5, focusing on his rejection of criticism that the results undermine the game’s art direction.

Why Vávra prefers the new lighting

In a post comparing a character’s face, Vávra argued that the original in-game lighting failed to show details already present in the artists’ work. He said the head models came from scans of real people, followed by artist refinement, and that the processed image better resembled those models as they appeared during production.

“This is our original artistic vision,” he wrote. He maintained that the comparison used unchanged model geometry and that missing helmet shadows were a technical limitation, rather than a deliberate visual choice. Those are Vávra’s assessments of the example he shared, not an independent finding that every DLSS 5 result preserves an artist’s intent.

A leaked-build experiment with a performance cost

In his earlier, more detailed account, Vávra singled out shadows cast by headwear and small costume details as improvements. He also praised the treatment of hair, while describing the changes to the surrounding environment as more limited.

He acknowledged that the frame rate fell by half. His post did not provide a hardware configuration or a benchmark breakdown, so that observation should not be treated as a general performance figure for the finished technology.

For players, these posts offer a developer’s perspective on experimental images, not an announcement of an official Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 DLSS 5 update. The wider distinction between unofficial experiments and supported releases also applies to the DLSS 5 mods reaching older RTX cards and PCSX2.