NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction: A Second-Gen Transformer for Better Ray Tracing on All RTX GPUs

by Geth Author

NVIDIA shipped DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction this month — a significant update to the AI-driven rendering technology that ships with all GeForce RTX GPUs. The headline change is a second-generation transformer neural network that handles denoising and Super Resolution together in a single unified model, replacing the previous split-architecture approach.

What Changed Under the Hood

DLSS 4.5's new architecture delivers 35% more compute capability and processes 20% more model parameters than its predecessor. That translates to a model with substantially more information and processing power to decide how to reconstruct each frame — which matters most in ray-traced scenes filled with complex lighting, reflections, and shadows.

The "Ray Reconstruction" component addresses one of ray tracing's core trade-offs: to run at playable frame rates, games must trace far fewer rays than would be physically accurate, then reconstruct the full image with AI. A better reconstruction model means better-looking results at the same ray budget — or equivalent quality using fewer rays, which frees GPU headroom for other effects.

27 Games at Launch, Including Your Likely List

DLSS 4.5 launches with day-one support across 27 games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, and DOOM: The Dark Ages. More titles are expected to follow as developers push their own integration patches through the DLSS SDK update.

Unlike some DLSS updates that target only recent GPU generations, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction runs on the full RTX lineup going back to RTX 20-series cards. That means owners of hardware from 2018 onwards benefit — a much broader install base than a feature limited to Ada or Blackwell architecture.

How to Get It

The update arrives through NVIDIA's Game Ready driver. Once a game developer ships their DLSS 4.5 patch, the new model activates automatically when DLSS Quality or Ray Reconstruction is enabled in the game's settings — no manual configuration required on the user side.

If you're running ray tracing in any of the supported titles and haven't seen the performance-to-quality ratio you expected, this update is worth testing. The improvement is most visible in scenes with multiple light sources, wet surfaces, or reflective geometry — exactly the cases where the old denoising model struggled most.

The Game Ready driver and supporting SDK are available now from the NVIDIA driver download page.