Developers over at Liquid Swords have been busy reacting to the mixed reviews of Samson, which released yesterday. The open-world brawler ships with full RTX support – including ray tracing and DLSS Multi Frame Generation. So, will it be getting a DLSS 5 makeover later this year? Based on comments from Tech Director Fredrik Lönn, probably not.

There was plenty of online chatter last month surrounding DLSS 5, immediately after it was revealed during the latest Nvidia GTC event. It was met with criticism over its ‘AI filter’ look, and even some Ubisoft & Capcom devs were surprised by the reveal, seeing it for the first time (like the rest of us) during the event. Nonetheless, Nvidia maintains that artists have full control over visuals and art direction, and it doesn’t have to always be about hyperrealism.

DLSS 5 integration is ideally put in place early in development

DLSS 5 will deliver all the great performance-boosting tech we love DLSS for (uspcaling, frame generation, etc.), but it’s the new neural rendering model that has people talking. In a recent comment to Wccftech, Lönn says, “We did look at the reveal, but DLSS 5 is not something we considered for Samson. Also, it does not seem like it is production-ready just yet as we launch our game”.

Nvidia demoed DLSS 5 in a handful of games during GTC in March, but it won’t be available until this Fall. So, it seems that the demos are just that – a limited preview, especially since Nvidia was using a rig with two RTX 5090 cards inside to power the technology. Lönn continued, suggesting that the team would need to integrate it into the pipeline much earlier.

For Samson, we have already authored and animated detailed facial models for our characters, and we do want them to look like how we made them in the game. If we were to use something like DLSS 5, we would ideally like to integrate it into the character production pipeline, so we have artistic control of the process.

The big win in the future, besides quality, for Neural Rendering and DLSS 5 would be in saving production time. But for that to happen, we would need to support all users, and very few people have access to the hardware required for DLSS 5.

If we were to use something like that in the future, we would need support across all platforms we are targeting for the game.

Fredrik Lönn, Tech Director at Liquid Swords, via Wccftech

Lönn says if the team were to use DLSS 5, it would need to be integrated into the production pipeline. Developers are currently able to tweak the intensity, color grading, and masking of DLSS 5’s neural rendering, and full artistic control would be easier if the team were able to build its models with this in mind from the start. After all, it would save production time, but at the same time may risk inconsistent visuals from platform to platform and between different hardware on PC.

Lönn’s comments also suggest that the team would be more open to DLSS 5 integration if it were available for a larger audience. It’s currently exclusive to Nvidia’s most recent RTX 50 series graphics cards, which obviously locks out console users, for a start, and we don’t see Nvidia bringing DLSS support to rival GPUs any time soon (or ever), either.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.