Nvidia has taken CES 2025 by storm, revealing the hotly anticipated GeForce RTX 50 Series following months of online rumours – but it’s not just hardware that Nvidia is showing off.
Also new is DLSS 4, the latest update to Nvidia’s suite of gaming-focused tools to boost the framerate and overall quality of supported gaming titles, and it’s an absolute doozy.
Not only does DLSS 4 introduce an entirely new AI system for rendering frames, but it also introduces the ability to generate multiple frames for the first time, offering a massive boost to PC gaming performance for RTX gamers.
Here’s everything you need to know about Nvidia DLSS 4, including all the new features and which GPUs support the technology.
What is Nvidia DLSS?
DLSS 4 may be new, but Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling – or DLSS – has been around for the past six years in some form or another.
DLSS is essentially a combination of several neural rendering technologies – Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction, Super Resolution, DLAA and more – powered by the Tensor Cores found within Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards.
The aim of the technology is simple; to boost your gameplay experience by improving the framerate while also delivering high-quality images that rival, or even surpass in some cases, what’s achieved by native resolution rendering.
It essentially allows you to, say, render a game at 1080p natively and upscale that to a high-quality 4K, allowing for way higher framerates and the use of more detailed textures while being a little easier on your PC or laptop.
The only catch is that developers need to manually add support for Nvidia’s DLSS tech within games, though with over 700 RTX-supported games and apps currently available, chances are that your favourite game already supports the tech.
What’s new with DLSS 4?
The headline addition to the fourth iteration of DLSS is undoubtedly DLSS Multi Frame Generation.
While the idea of using the Tensor Cores to generate new frames to up frame rate isn’t new, it has been limited to a single frame until now. With Multi Frame Generation, as the name suggests, the tech can render multiple frames before needing a new native frame – 3 frames, to be precise.
While that’ll already have a significant impact on the framerate in games, especially more graphically intense titles, when combined with the rest of the technology that makes up DLSS, you can multiply the framerate by up to 8x compared to traditional game rendering.
Nvidia claims that, combined with the new top-end RTX 5090, you can achieve 4K@120fps fully ray-traced gaming for the first time.
Multi Frame Generation tech aside, DLSS 4 introduces a complete overhaul of its AI models.
Ray Reconstruction, Super Resolution and DLAA will be powered by ‘transformers’, the same AI architecture powering the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini. Transformer-powered DLSS models improve image quality with improved stability, less ghosting and more detail, especially when motion is present.
The catch is that the GPU now needs to execute 5 AI models for each rendered frame, all within a few milliseconds, and that’s pretty intensive work. That’s likely a huge part of why Multi Frame Generation is only available on the RTX 50 series of GPUs, sporting a 2.5x boost to AI processing performance compared to the 40 series.
The company has confirmed that RTX 50 series users will be able to essentially self-upgrade games to support the latest generation of DLSS tools too.
Per the company, 75 apps and games that already support Frame Generation can be upgraded to Multi Grame Generation without waiting for native developer support, while all RTX GPUs will be able to benefit from the new DLSS transformer model. This is all managed via the GeForce Now app for PC.
Which GPUs are compatible with DLSS 4?
While DLSS 4 will undoubtedly work best with the latest RTX 50 series of GPUs, the update benefits all RTX GPUs back to the RTX 20 series – though the specifics depend on the generation of tech.
Unsurprisingly, the RTX 50 Series offers support for DLSS Multi Frame Generation along with enhanced DLSS Frame Generation, DLSS Ray Reconstruction, DLSS Super Resolution (Beta) and Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing Beta).
The RTX 40 Series gets enhanced DLSS Frame Generation, DLSS Ray Reconstruction, DLSS Super Resolution (Beta) and Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing Beta), while the RTX 30 and RTX 20 collections are limited to enhanced DLSS Ray Reconstruction, DLSS Super Resolution (Beta) and Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing Beta).
