Nvidia finally revealed their next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES 2025, with some big performance improvements expected thanks to the new Blackwell architecture. But since 2020 and the launch of the RTX 20 series, Nvidia has been working on and expanding its range of AI enhancements as part of its DLSS suite of exclusive features, with its latest iteration, DLSS 4, set to propel both new and older GPUs forward.
DLSS 4’s biggest new feature is one that will be exclusive to the new RTX 50-series GPUs. Multi Frame Generation is the next step in the Frame Generation race that Nvidia kicked off with the RTX 40-series range. Instead of just injecting a single, AI-generated frame between two traditionally rendered one, Multi Frame Generation now offers up to four AI-generated frames to be inserted, substantially increasing a game’s frame rate. Nvidia says that its new GPUs can deliver nearly eight times more performance than “brute-force” rendering, but how well each generated frame looks and how this impacts input latency has yet to be determined.
Digital Foundry was given access to an engineering sample of the RTX 5080 and limited time to test Multi Frame Generation in Cyberpunk 2077 and came away impressed with both the image quality and fluidity of the experience.
Perhaps more interesting are the DLSS 4 improvements that will be supported on all of Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. Nvidia has updated its transformer model that powers DLSS Super Sampling, Ray Reconstruction, and DLAA for the first time, moving away from its previous convolutional neural networks approach. What this means is that its newer model is more adept at identifying parts of a rendered image that are important and with more granularity, offering up more stable upscaling and ray-tracing quality as a result.
DLSS Super Resolution (Nvidia’s AI-enhanced upscaling solution), Ray Reconstruction, and DLAA will be improving thanks to this upgrade across all RTX hardware, starting with the RTX 20 series. Nvidia is also adding the ability to switch between specific DLSS releases from within its GeForce Experience application in the near future, which previously had to be manually done for each game if you wanted to experiment with newer DLSS versions that hadn’t been patched in by developers. This can potentially give some new life to older hardware, at least from an image-quality standpoint.
There’s no question that the headline feature for DLSS 4 is the one that only works on Nvidia’s latest and greatest hardware, which starts shipping later this month and will be supported in over 75 games and apps immediately. But unlike the update for Frame Generation with the RTX 40 series launch, there’s a lot more to get excited about for the many more already on Nvidia’s platform.