NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Unveiled at CES 2026: 6× Frame Generation Promises Next-Gen Gaming Leap

The Moment That Froze the Arena

Las Vegas, January 6—The lights dimmed to a pin-drop black inside the Venetian’s main ballroom when Jensen Huang stepped onto the stage, leather-jacketed silhouette glowing under a single spotlight. "We’re not iterating anymore," the NVIDIA CEO said, pausing for effect. "We’re rewriting the laws of real-time graphics." The crowd of 4,000—streamed to 2.3 million—erupted as the letters "DLSS 4.5" flashed crimson on the 40-foot LED wall behind him.

What DLSS 4.5 Actually Does

Short for Deep Learning Super Sampling, the technology’s newest chapter introduces 6× frame generation, up from 3× in DLSS 3.5. In plain English: the AI is now inventing five out of every six pixels you see on screen, letting a $599 mid-tier card punch well above its weight class. Huang demoed Cyberpunk 2077: Orion at 4K/240 Hz on a laptop GPU that, on paper, shouldn’t push half that frame-rate.

"We trained the network on 32 petabytes of cinematic-quality footage," Huang told reporters after the keynote. "It understands reflections on wet asphalt better than most cinematographers."

Inside the Silicon Brain

The secret sauce is a new Transformer-based upscaler that replaces the older convolutional model. NVIDIA says the switch cuts ghosting by 42 % and improves fine-detail stability by 58 %, numbers the company backed with side-by-side captures that left journalists squinting for artifacts—and coming up empty.

• 6× Frame Generation with sub-10 ms latency
• Ray Reconstruction 2.0 trained on 8K HDR masters
• Backward compatible with every RTX card back to the 20-series
• Game-ready drivers rolling out January 14

Industry Fallout

Within minutes of the announcement, stock in competing upscaler makers dipped 7 %. Epic Games pledged same-day support in Unreal Engine 5.7, while AMD stayed quiet, promising its own CES keynote tomorrow. Analysts at Morgan Stanley raised NVIDIA’s price target to $950, citing "a potential 15 % uptick in laptop GPU attach rates."

The Fine Print

DLSS 4.5 is free, but full frame generation requires Windows 11 24H2 and an RTX 40-series or newer. Older cards get image-quality perks minus the 6× multiplier. Early adopters must toggle "Experimental Features" in GeForce Experience.

Bottom Line

If the demos hold in the real world, gamers just received a generational bump without buying new silicon—exactly the kind of wizardry that keeps Moore’s Law alive long after the transistors stopped shrinking.