NVIDIA today announced the new DLSS 4.5 technology at its 2026 International CES media event, to improve gaming performance and image quality, bringing higher resolutions and refresh rates within reach of PC gamers. DLSS 4.5 is a major update over DLSS 4 that debuted in 2024 with the GeForce RTX 50-series "Blackwell" graphics cards. It is designed to bring games with performance-intensive path tracing effects to a broader audience, with the fastest RTX 50-series GPU models being able to play path-traced games at 4K Ultra HD with 240 Hz.

At the heart of the DLSS 4.5 update are two key announcements—2nd Generation Super Resolution Transformer, and Dynamic Multi Frame Generation. One of the defining features of DLSS 4 is its high-quality upscaler, which replaced convolutional neural network (CNN) based AI models with a newer Transformer-based model, resulting in a significant improvement in image quality. Now, at CES, NVIDIA announced that they have updated their algorithm with an even newer Transformer-based model that has been trained on a much larger dataset. This 2nd Gen Transformer was developed using five times the compute power that went into the first-gen DLSS 4 Transformer upscaler, and leverages the FP8 data format that's supported by the Tensor cores of GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" and 50-series "Blackwell" GPUs. DLSS 4.5 is still supported on older 30-series "Ampere" and 20-series "Turing" GPUs, however these generations lack FP8 acceleration, so the performance uplift over native wouldn't be as significant as with newer GPUs.