Daniel Vávra says DLSS 5 shows the faces of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II as intended

Daniel Vávra, creative director of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, went through an early build of DLSS 5 on his own game. He says the picture is not the one people argued about after NVIDIA's first presentation. Character geometry is not rewritten and no new models appear. Lighting, skin, faces, hair, and shadows are pulled from information the scene already has.

During development he argued with the artists that some faces looked thin. They showed him the models looking right on their machines and blamed the game's lighting. Vávra thinks DLSS 5 reads the normal maps toward the way more expensive skin shading works, and that the network is not inventing features on top.

An old frustration was shadows from hats, hoods, and helmets, which the sequel would not cast onto faces. Buckles, laces, and bags had the same problem. On the early build those shadows, and the shadows in hair, look denser, and grass shifts a little too. The cost is steep: the frame rate falls by about half.

When people said the filter breaks the intended look, Vávra answered that he is the creative director and this is the original intent. Faces were built from photogrammetry of real people and then finished by artists. What was not intended were the missing helmet shadows and the weak normals. On his comparisons the geometry is the same mesh the artist had in ZBrush, only with light the game could not manage before.