Nvidia DLSS 4.5 doesn't deliver upscaling miracles, but its most exciting feature is still to come

Nvidia DLSS 4.5 is now available in the latest stable release of Nvidia App, allowing over 400 games to make use of a new Super Resolution upscaling model via the app’s DLSS Overide feature. DLSS 4.5’s new model brings even better image quality than before, but don’t believe the hype around how it can suddenly, miraculously upscale from ultra-low resolutions like 240p. Because – news flash – it could already do that.

Yes, believe it or not, for all the ways in which Nvidia’s DLSS and other upscaling tools have rightly been called out for being far from a perfect technology, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, and Nvidia DLSS have long been able to provide remarkable results in certain scenarios. After all, when you consider that most games on the Steam Deck are running at 1280 x 800 using at least some level of FSR upscaling, clearly upscaling has long established its place as a very useful tool.

Back to DLSS 4.5, though, and while the more headline-grabbing focus of its launch was the yet-to-release 6x frame generation mode and even more exciting dynamic frame generation feature, what’s available today is just the new Super Resolution upscaling model. Called Model M, this new model uses a second-generation Transformer AI model, with Nvidia having previously changed from a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model to a Transformer model with DLSS 4.0.

This fundamental change in the way the AI model works brought about significant improvements to image quality with DLSS 4.0 Super Resolution, and Nvidia is making some bold claims about further improvements with this second iteration. “This second-generation model is our most sophisticated yet, utilizing five times the compute power of the original transformer model,” the company says on its DLSS 4.5 launch page.

This more sophisticated model has “been trained on a significantly expanded, high-fidelity dataset,” which Nvidia says has given it “a deeper understanding in every scene,” allowing it to “more intelligently use[s] game engine pixel sampling and motion data to deliver images that have better lighting, finer edges, and improved motion clarity.”

This improvement is evident when you start pixel-peeping, but don’t expect miracles with these changes. It’s a solid update, but DLSS 4.0 was already a major upgrade, and the differences I’ve spotted in-game are subtle. What’s more, the new model is expected to come with a slight performance hit, although in my tests the difference has been negligible, at least with me testing on an RTX 4080 Super. If you’re using an older, less capable card, the extra strain on its Tensor cores is expected to result in slight frame rate drops compared to previous DLSS models.

Back to image quality, though, and the talk of the town recently has been a video demonstrating the incredible ability of DLSS 4.5 to upscale Red Dead Redemption 2 from 240p to 720p, taking an absolutely potato-looking, unplayable image to a remarkably decent-looking one. However, as I hinted at above, this ability is far from new to DLSS 4.5. Yes, the latest Transformer model of 4.5 is the best yet, but DLSS 4’s first-gen Transformer, DLSS 3’s CNN model, and even FSR 3 do a decent job, as demonstrated in the image below of The Last of Us Part 1.

Here, I haven’t dropped quite as low as 240p, but the left-most example is the game running at 720p with 50% scaling, dropping the effective resolution to 360p. Then we have the image at 720p without upscaling, using the game’s standard temporal anti-aliasing, before moving on to AMD FSR 3, DLSS 3 (Preset F), DLSS 4 (Preset L), and finally DLSS 4.5 (Preset M). As you can see, FSR 3, DLSS 4, and DLSS 4.5 all stand apart as significantly better than DLSS 3, while all upscalers are a vast improvement over the best approximation I can make of running at native 360p.

Regardless, you can jump in and try DLSS 4.5 for yourself now. Just update Nvidia App and head to the Graphics > Global Settings section and select ‘DLSS Override – Model Presets’ to play around with the different models. Preset M is the latest, Preset L is DLSS 4, and the others are previous versions of DLSS Super Resolution.