“When the DLSS model fails it looks like ghosting or flickering or blurriness,” NVIDIA’s Brian Catanzaro says. DLSS 4.5 is built around that exact failure-state treating it less like an occasional blemish and more like the core engineering target. The result is a release that reads as a quality first upgrade for every RTX owner, paired with an aggressive performance ceiling for RTX 50 Series systems tuned for high-refresh displays.
For Modern Engineering Marvels readers, the headline is simple: DLSS 4.5 pushes image reconstruction forward with a new Super Resolution model that runs across the full GeForce RTX stack, while also setting up a spring expansion of Multi Frame Generation that aims squarely at 240+ FPS workloads on RTX 50 Series GPUs.
The most immediate piece is DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, which introduces a second-generation transformer model. NVIDIA positions it as the first major upgrade to the transformer approach introduced with DLSS 4, and notes the model uses five times the compute of the original transformer model, trained on a larger high-fidelity dataset. Practically, this targets the visible failure modes that tend to surface in motion: unstable fine detail, edge shimmer, and trailing artifacts when camera pans and fast animation overlap.
One of the more interesting technical pivots is how DLSS 4.5 handles lighting accumulation. NVIDIA describes earlier approaches including common temporal anti-aliasing patterns and older super-resolution models as leaning on logarithmic space to suppress flicker, which could mute highlights and crush shadow detail in high contrast scenes. DLSS 4.5 instead trains and infers in linear space, aligning with the engine’s native ground truth. That matters because path-traced content is unforgiving: the moment temporal stability comes at the expense of highlight energy, neon signage, specular reflections, and emissive surfaces lose the “pop” that makes physically based lighting feel correct.
On modern hardware, NVIDIA also leans on FP8 capability to keep the new model’s overhead controlled. The company notes GeForce RTX 40 and 50 Series GPUs benefit from faster Tensor Cores and FP8 throughput, allowing the second-generation transformer to run with only a minor performance tradeoff versus the first transformer model. Older RTX cards can still use the model, but the efficiency story is clearest on the newer architectures.
There is also an unusually practical distribution angle here. Rather than waiting on every game to ship a native DLSS 4.5 integration, the NVIDIA app can now apply a model override across a large library described as over 400 games and apps. In the NVIDIA app’s Graphics tab, the “DLSS Override feature Model Presets” can be set to “Latest” to force the new Model M, with an optional Model L that’s tuned for Ultra Performance at 4K. The important nuance is that this is not a new “mode” in the in-game menu; it is a model swap underneath existing DLSS hooks, designed to be backwards compatible with current integrations.
Quality gains tend to be most visible where upscalers historically struggle: low internal resolutions. NVIDIA calls out that DLSS 4.5 improves image quality across modes, but the biggest jump appears in Performance and Ultra Performance, where fewer pixels are being rendered and the reconstruction system has less raw data to work with. The company also points to reduced ghosting in fast motion, including an example in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered where fast-moving objects remain clearer with fewer trailing artifacts.
Then there is the performance narrative, which is more segmented by GPU generation. DLSS 4.5 introduces Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and a new 6X Multi Frame Generation mode for GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, scheduled for spring. The claim is that, when combined, the system can generate up to five additional frames per traditionally rendered frame and scale output toward the refresh rate of the connected display. NVIDIA further states that moving from 4X to 6X Multi Frame Generation can raise 4K frame rates in path-traced titles by up to 35% on RTX 50 Series hardware.
What makes the “dynamic” angle more than a checkbox is how it’s framed: as an automatic transmission for frame generation. Instead of pinning a fixed multiplier, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation shifts between multipliers to maintain a target frame rate (or display refresh rate), minimizing unnecessary generated frames when the base render rate is already high and dialing assistance up when scene complexity drags performance down. That dynamic behavior is positioned as a way to balance smoothness and responsiveness, especially when paired with NVIDIA Reflex to reduce latency impact.
DLSS 4.5 also lands in a broader ecosystem where neural rendering features are stacking up rather than replacing each other. DLSS Super Resolution, Frame Generation, Multi Frame Generation, DLAA, and Ray Reconstruction operate as a suite each one trying to reduce a specific cost of modern rendering, whether that’s raw shading load, ray-tracing noise, or temporal instability. NVIDIA describes DLSS as part of over 700 RTX games and apps, which helps explain why model-overrides in the NVIDIA app are treated as a first-class delivery mechanism rather than a stopgap.
The near-term takeaway is straightforward: RTX owners can treat DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution as a drop-in image-quality refresh via the NVIDIA app beta, with a full app release slated for January 13. The more forward-leaning promise Dynamic Multi Frame Generation plus 6X Multi Frame Generation belongs to RTX 50 Series users and arrives in spring, with the explicit target of making 240Hz-class displays feel less like an aspirational spec sheet and more like a render pipeline that can actually keep up.
