Nvidia wants to prove it’s still the leader of the pack with AI upscaling. The company’s DLSS technology is still the best for increasing in-game frame rates and enhancing visuals at the same time, but AMD and Intel’s latest efforts have narrowed the gap. To stake its claim, Nvidia is honing in on multi-frame generation for artificially bumping in-game frame rates, even if all those so-called “fake frames” make little sense if you already own one of its expensive graphics cards.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: DLSS 4.5 isn’t a whole new generation of AI enhancements. It builds upon last year’s major update to the technology that brought a new transformer model into the upscaling pipeline. Essentially, DLSS (deep-learning super sampling) takes a frame that’s rendered at a lower resolution and massages the pixels so it appears to run at a higher resolution. This enhances performance, though the transformer model has the added benefit of a large pre-trained dataset that’s supposed to recapture the glory of the game rendered at the native resolution.
Nvidia said the new transformer model has five times the compute behind it compared to the original transformer model introduced in 2025. DLSS was already good enough; it was hard to spot a difference between native and non-native images, but we’ll take better clarity any day of the week. This could be especially important for in-game lighting effects. You can see this impact in a game like Black Myth: Wukong, which normally defaults to DLSS on PC. There are more than 250 games running DLSS 4 (though there are more available if you force DLSS 4 settings through the Nvidia app), and Nvidia promises you’ll be able to get this working on RTX 40-series GPUs as well.
Intel’s XeSS 3 and AMD’s FSR Redstone upscalers both introduced a new form of multi-frame gen with their latest updates. Essentially, the GPU crafts AI-generated frames, which are then interlaced between rasterized (natively rendered) frames. This increases performance at the risk of making games feel floaty or unresponsive due to higher latency. Currently, the max frame gen on these other models is limited to 4X. Nvidia is now pushing that to 6X, and we once again have to wonder about the point of this move.
Nvidia says the updated frame generation is coming in spring this year. I try to warn gamers when we discuss frame generation that maintaining a solid playing experience means you’ll need to have between 50 and 60 fps already before enabling frame generation. This cuts down on latency and results in fewer visual glitches. So if you enable 6X frame gen on a PC that’s already pushing games hard, you won’t see the benefit unless you have a monitor that can handle a 240Hz or higher refresh rate. And if you can afford that monitor, you can probably afford a higher-end 50-series GPU. In which case, why do you even need so many fake frames?
But, hey, it’s still worth upgrading to DLSS 4.5. You can do so by switching “DLSS Override feature” to “latest” in the Nvidia app.
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