The takeaway: One of the many announcements Nvidia made at CES this week was the arrival of DLSS 4.5. The latest version of the upscaling tech can be enabled ahead of its official launch, which many users have done. The good news is that you can expect a higher level of graphical fidelity, as Nvidia promised. The less welcome part is that it comes with a performance hit compared to its predecessor, one that rises to over 20% when using a previous-gen RTX 3000 or RTX 2000 GPU.
Nvidia announced the DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution model with its second-generation transformer architecture this week. The company did admit that the latest version will be more demanding, but support for accelerated FP8 processing in the RTX 4000 and RTX 5000 GPUs' tensor cores should lighten the load. However, it made no guarantees about performance for those using RTX 3000 and RTX 2000 GPUs.
As it can be accessed now, there have been several early DLSS 4.5 benchmarks posted on X. Using the RTX 3080 Ti, Mostly Positive Reviews found that DLSS 4.5 Quality Mode on Cyberpunk 2077 at the RT Ultra preset in 4K saw a 24% drop in FPS compared to DLSS 4 – down from 42 FPS to 32 FPS.
Just did some quick and dirty tests with DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution in Cyberpunk, and on the 3080 Ti the performance hit between Preset K and Preset M is quite heavy.
– Mostly Positive Reviews (@mpr_reviews) January 6, 2026
4K RT Ultra Preset - DLSS Quality:
Preset K - 42 fps avg
Preset M - 32 fps avg
24% fps hit
1440p RT Ultra Preset…
The same test at 1440p saw the frame rate drop from 72 FPS to 61 FPS, a 14% fall. With ray tracing disabled, performance fell by 20%, from 108 FPS to 86 FPS.
It was a similar story with The Last of Us Part 2. At 1440p high settings with DLSS Quality mode, DLSS 4.5 performance was down 14% compared to its predecessor, falling from 154 FPS to 135 FPS.
Nvidia rep Jacob Freeman said that DLSS 4.5 uses five times more compute and is just 2-3% slower on RTX 5000 GPUs. However, some RTX 4000 and RTX 5000 users have reported performance drops of around 14-16% with DLSS 4.5 vs DLSS 4.
It uses 5x more compute. On RTX 50 its around a 2-3% performance hit, but the image quality benefits is massive.
– Jacob Freeman (@GeForce_JacobF) January 6, 2026
Nvidia said during its announcement that DLSS 4.5 was best used in Performance and Ultra Performance modes. The company also suggests in its DLSS programming guide for game developers that DLSS 4.0 presets J and K be used for DLAA, Quality, and Balanced modes, while DLSS 4.5 preset M is the default for Performance mode, and preset L is best used with Ultra Performance mode.
Despite the varying performance impacts, many say they are pleased with their early testing of DLSS 4.5, claiming that better image quality, textures, and other visual improvements outweigh any marginal performance hits – these are people with RTX 4000 and 5000 GPUs, presumably.
Have you tried DLSS 4.5 yet? Let us know what you think in the comments below.