Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 director defends DLSS 5, calls critics 'crazy'

Warhorse Studios director Daniel Vávra jumped into the DLSS 5 debate on X last Sunday, posting a before-and-after comparison of a character model in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and arguing the technology actually serves the game's artistic vision rather than undermining it.

Vávra's post targets critics who see DLSS 5 as AI slop distorting developer intent. He pointed to the game engine's lighting limitations — specifically its inability to properly render shadows, skin texture, and normal map detail — as the real culprit behind the worse-looking original. "Having no shadows from helmets on faces and fucked up normal map rendering WAS NOT OUR ORIGINAL ARTISTIC VISION," he wrote, framing DLSS 5 as a corrective tool rather than an artistic override. Some on X pushed back hard. User Goosewasinuse acknowledged Vávra's reasoning but argued DLSS 5 "oils up characters to the nth degree for muh realism" in a way that looks bizarre, while Knight(Fate)1029384756 went further: "It's not my fault you couldn't put the effort into making it better. Instead you use the machine that can't think to make an artistic choice."

DLSS 5 has drawn wider scrutiny because its image reconstruction is aggressive enough to visibly alter how a game looks — not just sharpen it. The debate isn't purely technical. Critics argue that AI smoothing out imperfections can strip out the texture and character that make handcrafted art feel human, even when the "imperfections" were engine limitations rather than intentional choices. Nvidia has been actively trying to counter that narrative, and Vávra's post lands squarely in that ongoing fight.

The controversy lands at an awkward moment for Warhorse. Earlier this year, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 English language editor Max Hejtmánek said publicly that the studio let him go to be "replaced with AI" — a claim that made the rounds and put the studio's relationship with AI tools under a harsher spotlight. Vávra's defense of DLSS 5 is unlikely to quiet those concerns.