Some people have literally gone crazy. On the left is a head messed up by the game engine’s very limited lighting system, which can’t properly render shadows, skin texture, and the detail of normal maps. 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. Some random nutcase on the internet: THIS IS AI SLOP! I WANT THE ORIGINAL ARTISTIC VISION! The head models were 3D scanned (using photogrammetry) from real people and then polished by artists. I am the creative director of the game. This is our original artistic vision and looks like static renders of the models from Zbrush when we made them. Or like real @thisistommckay :) Having no shadows from helmets on faces and fucked up normal map rendering WAS NOT OUR ORIGINAL ARTISTIC VISION. People are crazy.

After all the controversy about NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 being a terrible AI slop, I played around a bit with the leaked DLSS5 version in KCD2. First off—what was leaked isn’t even remotely what NVIDIA originally presented. It doesn’t alter the geometry of the models or the appearance of the characters in any way. I repeat: It doesn’t alter the geometry of the models or the appearance of the characters in any way! What it does is take existing normal maps and create much better skin texture and facial detail (examples 6 and 2) than the lighting model in the game. It also looks a bit like an attempt at subsurface scattering and other advanced skin rendering techniques. But sceptics could say, that its just a fancy version of clarity and dehaze filters which have very similar effect. 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. Above all, though, it makes ambient occlusion look like it’s on steroids. 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! (see examples 1, 3, 7, 8, and 11). On top of that, it improves the rendering of shadows in hair (5), so they finally have the right density and darkness. It doesn’t do much in the environment, but interestingly, it lightens shadows in some places and renders textures within them, while darkening them where it makes sense (10, 12, 13, 14). So there’s a slight improvement here as well. It also renders shadows in grass and vegetation better. Which is definitely a good thing. For me, this is primarily an excellent photo realistic upgrade to the character lighting model. The “minor” issue is that it cuts the frame rate in half :) But its not the infamous AI slop we saw couple months ago. I see huge potential here for the future, and it’s absolutely great that even older games lighting could be improved this way.