DLSS has come a long way since its first showing, when Remedy’s Control looked like someone had smeared the screen with petroleum jelly. Once Nvidia shipped DLSS 2.0 in April 2020, it took a clear lead in upscaling and has been lapping the field ever since.
Nearly six years later, DLSS 4.5 has arrived, and it is the sort of update you could call DLSS 5.0. Image quality gains are obvious, but some GPUs will deliver better results than others.
DLSS 4 was never “terrible” and was rarely even “bad,” but it still had quirks that stood out in motion. The usual suspects were occasional screen tearing, foliage pop-in and a bit of ghosting even on the Quality preset. DLSS 4.5 does a strong job of stamping those down, with improvements you can see without zooming in. The fidelity is steadier, particle effects look better, and motion is less twitchy, which is exactly where earlier versions could wobble.
At 1440p, an RTX 4070 Ti has plenty of breathing room, so sticking to DLSS Quality has been the easy default in demanding games. Foliage has remained the last annoying issue even at Quality, since that mode still leaves a noticeable gap between internal and output resolution.
Nvidia has tucked the 4.5 change behind a simple preset switch in the Nvidia App, moving from DLSS 4’s Preset J and Preset K to DLSS 4.5’s Preset L and Preset M. Preset M is the sensible pick if you are not trying to live in Ultra Performance land.
In Arc Raiders, DLSS Quality on DLSS 4.5 cleans up the edges and tearing around distant foliage, making bushes and vegetation look less like they are vibrating. Frame rate takes a small hit but stays above 110 fps.
There is a noticeable shift in blacks, with a deeper, almost HDR-like punch absent in DLSS 4. It is the sort of contrast change is the kind of thing you spot instantly once you know it is there.
According to XDA developers Black Myth: Wukong is where DLSS 4.5 shows why Nvidia bothered. DLSS 4 Quality looks good until the slightest movement, then UE5 shimmer, ghosting and object trails make a mockery of the illusion.
Switching to 4.5 almost wipes out the ghosting and shimmer, with “almost” doing the heavy lifting. It is not perfect, but it is enough to make a 70-plus fps experience feel viable without your character’s outline smearing across the screen.
DLSS 4.5 brings richer darks and denser foliage improvements here, especially when looking up at the skybox. If you are on an RTX 40-series GPU or newer, it starts to look like a must-have rather than a nice-to-have.
The catch is that none of this comes for free, unless you are one of those people who think GPU power limits are just friendly suggestions. In Black Myth, moving to DLSS 4.5 while keeping settings the same dropped average fps from 64 to 61, roughly a four to five per cent hit.
VRAM use climbs, going from 7,328MB to 7,530MB across repeated tests, about 202MB extra. That lines up with the programming guidance that pegs the added requirement at roughly 208MB when switching from DLSS 4 to DLSS 4.5.
At 4K, the VRAM tax grows to nearly 500MB on RTX 40 and 50-series cards, and more than 600MB on anything older. That is manageable on newer cards with headroom, but it is a nasty squeeze on RTX 20 and 30-series parts.
Nvidia has technically opened DLSS 4.5 to RTX 20 and 30-series owners, but the older FP16 cards struggle more than you might like. Unless you have an RTX 2080 Ti, you are often better sticking with DLSS 4 Preset K, which uses vastly less VRAM at 1440p.
RTX 30-series owners might get away with DLSS 4.5 above an RTX 3070 if they stick to 1440p, while RTX 3090 owners can be as reckless as they like. It is still a big deal that Nvidia has not kicked RTX 20-series users out of the conversation, even if the upgrade is not a no-brainer for them.
Power draw is another cost, and it matters to anyone who likes undervolting. DLSS 4.5 can push RTX 20 and 30-series cards closer to their power limits and into throttling territory, which is the opposite of what you want from an image-quality upgrade.
Path tracing is where things get weird, because Ray Reconstruction tends to override DLSS 4.5 rather than playing nicely with it. Ray Reconstruction models handle their own upscaling, denoising, and anti-aliasing, so DLSS Super Resolution does not get to do its thing.
