NVIDIA DLSS 4.5
NVIDIA’s launching the biggest update to DLSS today in the form of DLSS 4.5. After what can be described as a rather harsh unveiling of DLSS 5, NVIDIA is focusing its energies on what they’ve done well for a long time. At least, until they can figure out a way to position DLSS 5 in a better light. So what’s the big feature drop in DLSS 4.5 you ask? It’s Dynamic Multi Frame Generation alongside a new 6x Multi Frame Generation mode. Instead of making the users run a few A/B tests to figure out which MFG profile makes the most sense, NVIDIA’s letting the software take control and determine it without letting gamers stress over the settings. The multiplier will be varied dynamically depending on the workload i.e. how complex the scene is and how taxing it can be on the graphics card, and the display refresh target. NVIDIA also says that this can enable 240+ FPS path tracing on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs. Path Tracing, is the more intensive cousin of Ray Tracing, or you can call it “Actual Ray Tracing”.
NVIDIA puts it quite aptly when they describe DMFG as “an automatic transmission for your GPU”. It functions by continuously monitoring the gap between your graphics card’s performance and your display’s maximum refresh rate. The Radeon Boost feature by AMD also tries to achieve similar goals of maintaining a high frame rate so that gamers don’t have to pause the game and fiddle with the settings in the middle of a complex scene. However, the approaches that the two companies have are completely different. AMD reduced the screen resolution to boost frame rates whereas NVIDIA varies the amount of AI generated frames to keep the frame rates high. Both have different levels of quality tradeoffs to achieve quality of life improvements for gamers. It comes down to how perceivable those tradeoffs are. Of late, the switch to better AI models has resulted in the quality of AI generated frames improving quite a bit so if you’re unperturbed by what you see, and you’re liking the high frame rate, then DMFG is a great thing to toggle on.
With DMFG, NVIDIA isn’t packaging a simple toggle for MFG here. They’ve got NVIDIA Reflex to reduce latency and the newer AI models that we spoke of, they all come together to offer a much better visual experience.
If you’ve installed the NVIDIA App, then it becomes quite simple. If not, you can get the latest version of the NVIDIA App from the official download page. Anything over version 11.0.7.216 should allow you to toggle DMFG. In the ‘Graphics’ option on the sidebar, you can find all the games which are currently recognised by the NVIDIA App. Click on the one you’d like to toggle DMFG on and then select the ‘DLSS Override – Model Presets’ option. There will be multiple presets here, click on ‘Recommended’ and the app will do the rest.
There are multiple models to pick from, NVIDIA states that Model M is optimised for DLSS Super Resolution Performance mode, Model L for 4K DLSS Super Resolution Ultra Performance mode, and Model K for the remaining modes. If you’re running an older RTX 20 or RTX 30 series card, then the new M and L models will be more compute heavy on these older cards. NVIDIA recommends Model K which is DLSS 4.0 for the older cards.
And if you want to check out what DMFG profile is currently running while you’re in the game then you can switch the ‘Statistics View’ to DLSS in the NVIDIA App overlay within the game.
We ran the games on an RTX 5090 sitting in PC powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 48 GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 6000 MT/s. We’re currently running the games on the RTX 3080 and an older gen RTX 2060 to see how the models fare on the older card. We’ll update the graphs as we finish those runs.
We can see that the DMFG fluctuates between 3x and 6x in games such as Hogwarts Legacy, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and Cyberpunk 2077, pushing frame rates well past 200 fps at 4K and beyond 350 fps at 1440p in select test scenarios. What gamers can takeaway is that DMMFG is not just inflating FPS numbers, it is trying to keep high-refresh displays fed more intelligently while also reducing some of the usual UI artefacts tied to frame generation.
NVIDIA maintains a massive list of all the games which support its cutting edge features over here. This also includes the new titles which support DLSS 4.5 such as ARC Raiders, Marvel Rivals Season 7 and more.