Last night, Nvidia finally unveiled the RTX 50-generation graphics cards – but over the holiday period, I had the opportunity to spend some time testing out the brand new DLSS 4 upscaling and frame generation technology on a PC kitted out with the new GeForce RTX 5080, running an updated build of Cyberpunk 2077 – and it’s impressive. Nvidia has upgraded its super resolution upscaling and ray reconstruction technology with a new ‘vision transformer’ model, offering some dramatic quality upgrades, while frame generation is boosted from one interpolated frame to two – or even three. The end result is a better-looking Cyberpunk 2077 capable of running the full path-traced experience at frame-rates well, well north of 120fps.
There’s a lot to discuss here but to be clear, this is preview, first look coverage. The RTX 5080 I had access to is an engineering sample. The drivers are not final. I can offer a broad idea of how DLSS 4 works and ballpark frame-rate increases, but exact numbers will have to wait for review hardware and final drivers. Also, the limited time window I had with the hardware limits the extent of the testing I could carry out – but regardless, I saw enough and captured enough to have an initial response to the new technology.
The fruits of my visit are helpfully embedded below, but speaking of capture, just like DLSS 3 frame-gen before it, showing off how DLSS 4 actually looks is somewhat difficult, owing to the frame-rate amplification factor of the new frame generation system. Multi-frame generation makes DLSS 4 a good fit for the latest wave of QD-OLED 4K 240Hz monitors – but there is no capture technology on the market capable of capturing ultra HD at 240 frames per second.
In the video b-roll, I tried to show the quality of frame generation by capping to 120fps, then slowing down by 50 percent to fit within the limits of YouTube’s top-end 4K 60fps container. However, running unlocked, frame-rates are much higher than the 120fps limit I imposed. So while the video gives you an idea of how the new frame-gen presents, the real-world experience is something quite different: frame persistence will be significantly lower and therefore frame generation artefacts are far less noticeable. In effect, I needed to hold back DLSS 4 to give any kind of representative media on a video platform. DLSS 4 with full multi-frame-gen enabled is designed for the latest generation of high refresh rate displays and I experienced it on an Alienware AW3225QF QD-OLED 4K 240Hz monitor running fully unlocked – and it’s quite the thing.