Samson Dev: DLSS 5 Needs Pipeline Control, Broad Hardware
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- Liquid Swords Tech Director Fredrik Lönn told Wccftech on the launch day of Samson: A Tyndalston Story that DLSS 5 is not production-ready and was never considered for their debut title.
- Lönn said the key requirement is pipeline integration so developers retain artistic control over character models, noting Liquid Swords had already authored and animated detailed facial rigs for Samson that they want to preserve.
- DLSS 5 also needs to run across all platforms Liquid Swords targets, Lönn said, arguing that the real payoff of neural rendering would be production-time savings — but only if it works on non-flagship hardware.
- NVIDIA's GTC 2026 DLSS 5 demo ran on two GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards; the company has said it is confident it can make it run on a single 5090, a bar still well above PS5, Xbox Series S/X, and PS5 Pro.
- Samson ships on Unreal Engine with DLSS 4.5 and ray tracing, but the article's author notes that broader engine-level integration — beyond tweaking intensity, color grading, and masking — is what developers are asking for.
- Mundfish, the studio behind Atomic Heart, has separately declined to commit to DLSS 5 and rejected AI tools in daily production for now, per a related Wccftech report linked in the piece.
Why it matters: Developers are telling NVIDIA the conditions under which they would adopt DLSS 5 — pipeline control and cross-platform support — but the GTC demo's dual-RTX-5090 requirement makes the hardware ask unrealistic on consoles and mid-range PCs. If most studios hold out for broad support, NVIDIA's most visually ambitious upscaling tech could face the same adoption ceiling that limited earlier neural-rendering pushes.
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