Nvidia has finally unveiled their next-generation RTX 50-series graphics cards at CES 2025, promising significant performance enhancements attributed to the new Blackwell architecture. However, since the release of the RTX 20 series in 2020, Nvidia has been actively developing and expanding its range of AI features as part of its DLSS suite, with the latest version, DLSS 4, designed to advance both new and existing GPUs.
The most notable new feature of DLSS 4 is a capability that will be exclusive to the new RTX 50-series GPUs. Multi Frame Generation is the next evolution in the Frame Generation technology that Nvidia introduced with the RTX 40-series line. Instead of merely inserting a single AI-generated frame between two traditionally rendered ones, Multi Frame Generation can now inject up to four AI-generated frames, greatly enhancing a game’s frame rate. Nvidia claims that its new GPUs can deliver nearly eight times the performance of conventional rendering methods, but the quality of each generated frame and the impact on input latency remains to be seen.
Digital Foundry was granted access to an engineering sample of the RTX 5080 and had a limited timeframe to assess Multi Frame Generation in Cyberpunk 2077, and they were impressed with both the visual fidelity and the smoothness of the experience.
Perhaps even more exciting are the DLSS 4 enhancements that will be available across all of Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. Nvidia has upgraded its transformer model that supports DLSS Super Sampling, Ray Reconstruction, and DLAA for the first time, moving away from its previous convolutional neural networks design. This means that the new model is more adept at recognizing elements of a rendered image that may be significant, providing finer detail for more consistent upscaling and ray-tracing quality.
DLSS Super Resolution (Nvidia’s AI-driven upscaling solution), Ray Reconstruction, and DLAA will be enhanced due to this support across all RTX hardware, starting from the RTX 20 series. Nvidia is also adding the capability to switch between specific DLSS versions directly within its GeForce Experience app soon, which previously had to be manually managed.