At CES 2026, NVIDIA dropped something pretty exciting for PC gamers, they unveiled DLSS 4.5, which they’re calling “Popeye,” and it’s basically their most advanced version yet for boosting both how games look and how smoothly they run.
The biggest upgrade is the super-resolution part of DLSS 4.5, which makes games look way better and fixes the issues people had with DLSS 4. Then there’s this wild 6x Multi-Frame Generation feature that creates even more frames than before, making everything feel incredibly smooth when you’re playing.
Remember when DLSS 4 came out last year with that Multi-Frame Generation tech? That could already generate up to 3 extra frames for every one the game actually rendered, giving you 4 times the frame rate. Now with DLSS 4.5, they’ve pushed that to 6x, which is honestly kind of insane. They’re also using a newer, second-generation Transformer model that makes images look sharper and more detailed.
But here’s where it gets really interesting – NVIDIA added something called Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation. Basically, if you’ve got a monitor with a really high refresh rate (we’re talking 240Hz or higher), you can set your target frame rate and DLSS 4.5 will automatically adjust between 1x and 6x generation to keep you at that sweet spot. According to what NVIDIA showed, most demanding games need about 3x or 4x mode to hit 240Hz. The full 6x mode? That’s really meant for people running 4K displays at 360Hz or even higher.
The super-resolution tech got some serious love too. NVIDIA introduced their Transformer model with DLSS 4, which was already way better than the old Convolutional Neural Network approach and fixed a lot of what was wrong with DLSS 3. But apparently there was still room to improve. That’s where the second-gen Transformer model in DLSS 4.5 comes in. It’s got five times more processing power and uses Blackwell’s FP8 technology to be smarter about understanding what’s happening in the scene and choosing which pixels to work with.
This tackles three specific problems gamers have been dealing with. First, there’s temporal stability – that’s when frames don’t quite match up with each other, making details look inconsistent or shimmer. DLSS 4.5 keeps things way more stable frame-to-frame than DLSS 4 did. Then there’s ghosting, where moving objects leave these annoying trails behind them – think of a car speeding by or swinging your weapon around. This gets worse at higher frame rates, and DLSS 4.5 does a much better job of cleaning that up.
The anti-aliasing improvements are also noticeable. Like, if you’ve ever seen a character moving and their edges look jagged or rough? DLSS 4.5 smooths all that out and actually reveals more fine details in the process. NVIDIA also mentioned they’ve released the GeForce Game Ready 591.74 driver that supports DLSS 4.5’s RTX Super Resolution, and it works with over 400 games already.
Here’s the cool part about who can use this: the AI Super Resolution features work on all RTX cards, even going back to the RTX 20 series. So pretty much anyone with an RTX GPU gets the better image quality. The Dynamic 6x frame generation mode is exclusive to the new RTX 50 series cards though, and that’s coming sometime in spring 2026.
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