At CES 2026, NVIDIA introduced DLSS 4.5, based on the second generation of the transformer model. The update is available to all owners of GeForce RTX graphics cards starting from the 20 series and is already included in the latest driver versions. However, first tests show that the increase in image quality is accompanied by a noticeable drop in performance, especially on older GPUs.
The issue is that RTX 40 and RTX 50 graphics cards support the FP8 computing format, which reduces the load and speeds up processing, while RTX 20 and RTX 30 use other methods. They require approximately twice as much video memory and up to five times the number of computational operations.
According to NVIDIA documentation, DLSS 4.5 consumes 40–53% more video memory on RTX 40 and RTX 50 compared to DLSS 4.0, and up to 103% on RTX 20 and RTX 30. Cards with 8 GB of VRAM, including the RTX 3070, quickly hit the memory limit, leading to additional performance loss. On RTX 40 and RTX 50, thanks to FP8 support, the FPS drop usually does not exceed 2–3%.
First user tests confirm that, for example, in Cyberpunk 2077 with DLSS 4.5 active in "Quality" mode on an RTX 3080 Ti, performance losses reach 24% compared to DLSS 4.0 at 4K resolution with ray tracing enabled. In 1440p, the drop is about 14%, and without ray tracing, it is up to 20%.
At the same time, a noticeable improvement in image quality, detail level, and a reduction in the number of artifacts in various projects is noted. Thus, it makes sense for RTX 20 and RTX 30 owners to enable DLSS 4.5 only in those games where the graphics card provides a sufficient FPS margin to justify the increase in visual quality with a loss of approximately 15–20% of the frame rate.