For the first time in years, Nvidia refused to introduce new GeForce graphics card models at CES. CEO Jensen Huang's signature sprawling and underrehearsed 90-minute keynote focused almost entirely on the company's dominant AI business, relegating the company's gaming-related announcements to a separate video posted later in the evening.
Instead, the company focused on software improvements for the existing hardware. The biggest announcement along these lines is DLSS 4.5, which adds a handful of new features to Nvidia's basket of upscaling and frame generation technologies.
DLSS scaling is improved by a new “second-generation transformer model” that Nvidia says is “trained on an extensive data set” to improve predictions when generating new pixels. According to Nvidia's Bryan Catanzaro, this is especially beneficial for image quality in Performance and Ultra Performance modes, where the upscaler takes more guesswork as it works from a lower-resolution source image.
DLSS Multi-Frame Generation is also improved, increasing the number of AI-generated frames per rendered frame from three to five. This new 6x mode for DLSS MFG is combined with something called Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation, where the number of frames generated by AI can change dynamically, increasing the frames generated during “demanding scenes” and decreasing the number of frames generated during simpler scenes “so it only calculates what is needed.”
The standard caveats for Multi-Frame Generation still apply: it still needs an RTX 50-series GPU (the 40-series can still only generate one frame for each frame rendered, and older cards can't generate additional frames at all), and the game still needs to run at a fairly high base frame rate to minimize lag and weird rendering artifacts. It remains a useful tool for making fast-paced games run faster, but it won't help make an unplayable frame rate playable.
