NVIDIA DLSS 4 promises to be a massive game-changer, introducing significant image quality and performance improvements, as highlighted by an early test conducted at CES 2025 with CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077.
The tech experts at Digital Foundry had the chance to go hands-on with NVIDIA DLSS 4 and the recently announced RTX 5080 GPU, highlighting in a new analysis how, even in its early state running on an engineering sample without the final driver, the new version of the tech is a different AI-upscaler compared to the current version, introducing significant image quality and performance improvements. The new model using a vision transformer brings greater image stability, reduced ghosting, higher detail, and enhanced anti-aliasing, improvements that address a good portion of the image quality issues seen with the previous convolutional neural network used by DLSS 3.
Among the improvements NVIDIA DLSS 4 will bring is the RTX 50 series-exclusive Multi Frame Generation, which generates up to three additional frames per traditionally rendered frame, working with the complete suit of DLSS technology to provide a frame rate boost of up to 8x over traditional rendering. In one of the game’s most demanding areas, the black market in the Petrochem stadium, using NVIDIA DLSS 4 and current Frame Generation on an RTX 5080, Cyberpunk 2077 runs at 4K output resolution with path tracing with a 535% frame-rate boost compared to native 4K resolution. The boost gets bigger at 725% with two generated frames and a whopping 935% with three generated frames. In every scenario, this means that the framerate went well past the 120 FPS mark, which is extremely impressive, considering we are talking about the game running with demanding path tracing.
Frame pacing is also improved in the x4-enabled multi-frame generation compared to the regular x2 of the single-frame generation, as NVIDIA had promised in the announcement. The only downside is the additional latency. Digital Foundry measured latency at 55.50 ms average when using DLSS 4 x3 and 57.30 ms when using DLSS 4 x4, compared to 50.97 ms with single-frame generation (x2). There’s an additional 6.4 milliseconds of latency when using x4 instead of x2, then, but you get a 71% frame rate boost, which is more than a fair trade.
Cyberpunk 2077 is among the games that will get native in-game support later this month, together with Alan Wake 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and others. A few more titles, like Black Myth: Wukong and Marvel Rivals, will receive in-game support at a later time, while Alan Wake 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are also getting two new technologies (RTX Hair and RTX Mega Geometry, respectively) that are part of the newly announced NVIDIA RTX Kit.
