Community tests confirm DLSS 4.5 yields 20%+ performance loss on older RTX 30 and 20 series GPUs compared to DLSS 4.0 — Nvidia warnings ring true following rollout
DLSS 4.5 testing by enthusiasts has revealed a 20% or greater performance reduction compared to DLSS 4.0 on RTX 20- and 30-series GPUs.
(Image credit: Nvidia)
DLSS 4.5 arrived today with the latest Nvidia driver, and enthusiasts have already put the new upscaling model through its paces, benchmarking it on older RTX 30-series hardware. Mostly Positive Reviews on X, ran several benchmarks on their RTX 3080 Ti in Cyberpunk 2077, comparing DLSS 4.5 to 4.0, and saw up to a 24% performance hit from the more computationally intensive DLSS 4.5 model.
At the RT Ultra preset, Cyberpunk 2077 saw a 24% reduction in FPS, going from 42 FPS to 32 FPS when switching to DLSS 4.5. At 1440p, the performance drop went down to 14%, going from 72 FPS to 61 FPS, and at 1440p with ray-tracing disabled, performance dropped by 20%, going down from 108 FPS to 86 FPS.
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Resolution and graphics settings
Frame Rate
DLSS Model
4k / RT Ultra
32 FPS (avg)
DLSS 4.5 (Preset M) - Quality Mode
4k / RT Ultra
42 FPS (avg)
DLSS 4.0 (Preset K) - Quality Mode
1440p / RT Ultra
61 FPS (avg)
DLSS 4.5 (Preset M) - Quality Mode
1440p / RT Ultra
72 FPS (avg)
DLSS 4.0 (Preset K) - Quality Mode
1440p / Ultra (no RT)
86 FPS (avg)
DLSS 4.5 (Preset M) - Quality Mode
1440p / Ultra (no RT)
108 FPS (avg)
DLSS 4.0 (Preset K) - Quality Mode
These benchmark results are not surprising to see. Nvidia warned that it could not guarantee speedy performance from DLSS 4.5 on older RTX cards, specifically 30- and 20-series products DLSS 4.5 is a whopping 5x more computationally intensive on the tensor cores, but Nvidia is leveraging FP8 precision in RTX 40 and RTX 50 series cards for DLSS 4.5 to lessen the performance impact on newer cards.
Nvidia rep Jacob Freeman claims (on X) that DLSS 4.5 only runs 2-3% slower compared to DLSS 4.0 on RTX 50 series hardware. Sadly, RTX 30- and 20-series tensor cores lack FP8 capability.
In fact, owners of older RTX 30 and 20 series GPUs have been seeing regressions in DLSS computational performance since DLSS 4.0 launched. RTX 20, 30, and even RTX 40 series hardware run DLSS 4.0 upscaling slower compared to RTX 50 series GPUs. But it seems with DLSS 4.5, this effect has become substantially worse on older cards.
