NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Launches With 5x More Compute Power for Gaming AI

Luisa Crawford
Jan 14, 2026 14:30

NVIDIA unveils DLSS 4.5 at CES 2026 with second-gen transformer model, 6x frame generation, and neural shading upgrades for RTX GPUs.

NVIDIA dropped DLSS 4.5 at CES 2026, packing a second-generation transformer model that uses 5x more compute than its predecessor. The upgrade targets the 250+ games already running DLSS 4, with major upcoming titles like PRAGMATA and Resident Evil Requiem queued for integration.

The company’s stock sits at $185.81 as of January 13, with shares up 0.47% over 24 hours and a market cap hovering around $4.51 trillion. This release comes as NVIDIA navigates fresh regulatory developments, with the U.S. recently approving H200 chip exports to China under certain conditions.

What’s Actually New

The second-gen transformer model represents the technical meat here. NVIDIA trained it on an expanded dataset, giving the AI better context awareness for scene analysis and smarter pixel sampling. The practical result? Performance Mode now matches or beats native resolution quality, while Ultra Performance becomes genuinely usable for 4K gaming.

Dynamic Multi Frame Generation is the other headline feature. Rather than locking frame generation at a fixed multiplier, the system now shifts automatically based on scene demands. A 6x mode for RTX 50 Series GPUs arrives this spring through Streamline Plugin updates.

Neural Shading Gets Faster

The RTX Neural Texture Compression SDK hit version 0.9 with some notable benchmarks. Block Compression 7 encoding runs 6x faster than before, while inference speed jumped 20% to 40% compared to version 0.8. Developers can now save up to 7x system memory without tanking frame rates.

RTX Kit update 2026.1 bundles these improvements with bug fixes for the Neural Shaders SDK and adds Vulkan support for RTX Hair rendering.

ACE Expands AI Character Options

NVIDIA’s ACE platform now supports the Nemotron Nano 9B V2 model through an In-game Inferencing SDK plugin. The model handles real-time reasoning for non-scripted NPC interactions. Developers can disable intermediate reasoning traces to speed up responses when precision matters less than snappiness.

Qwen3-8B support expanded to include 4B and 600M variants, giving studios more flexibility when balancing memory usage against response quality.

Developer Timeline

DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution is available now through the Streamline Plugin. The 6x Dynamic Multi Frame Generation mode hits this spring. Nsight Graphics 2025.5 already shipped with dynamic shader editing and RTX Hair visualization in the Ray Tracing Inspector.

For NVIDIA investors watching the gaming segment, adoption velocity matters. DLSS 4 became the company’s fastest-adopted gaming tech ever. Whether 4.5 maintains that momentum—particularly with the 6x mode requiring RTX 50 Series hardware—will show up in developer integration rates over the coming quarters.

Image source: Shutterstock