NVIDIA upgrades DLSS 4.5 with second-gen transformer

NVIDIA is using Gamescom to roll out major graphic upgrades for PC gamers, headlined by DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction and a long-developed tech called RTX Mega Geometry.

Here is what is new and why your games are about to look noticeably sharper.

Smarter transformers and instant upgrades

DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction upgrades its core engine to a second-generation transformer model.

The new neural net packs 35% more compute capability and handles 20% more parameters, giving it substantially more horsepower to denoise and reconstruct ray-traced lighting data.

The real-world differences are immediately visible in fast-moving scenes. Snow particle ghosting is gone in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, PRAGMATA fixes residual laser artifacts, and Alan Wake 2 stabilizes the noisy CRT television scanlines.

Better yet, players do not have to wait for developers to ship manual patches. By updating to Game Ready Driver 580.88 WHQL and enabling Early Access inside the NVIDIA app (with a public launch coming in September), users can inject DLSS 4.5 into 30 supported titles right now.

The roster includes Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, DOOM: The Dark Ages, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Hogwarts Legacy.

RTX Mega Geometry fixes Unreal Engine 5's biggest flaw

The most technically ambitious announcement is RTX Mega Geometry, an innovation six years in the making.

Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite technology lets developers cram film-quality geometric density into game worlds. However, because existing DXR 1.2 and Vulkan pipelines find ray-tracing Nanite objects prohibitively expensive, the engine quietly swaps them for primitive low-poly proxy meshes when calculating lighting.

The result was jarring: crisp meshes casting blocky, flickering shadows and blurry reflections.

RTX Mega Geometry completely removes that proxy compromise. In a preview of Gears of War: E-Day, ray-traced passes capture every single micro-detail, from shopping cart spokes to scattered pebbles and soda cans.

The tech debuts with Gears of War: E-Day on October 6th, leveraging Unreal Engine 5.8’s Lumen and MegaLights. Crucially, Microsoft will codify the technology directly into the upcoming DirectX Raytracing 2.0 (DXR 2.0) standard, opening it up to all future UE5 projects.

Alongside the engine news, Remedy confirmed that CONTROL Resonant will arrive September 24th featuring DLSS 4.5 and full path tracing, bundled with select RTX 50 series desktop and laptop GPUs.

Why it matters

For gamers, the immediate win is accessibility. Usually, new graphics features require months of waiting on individual studio patches. Getting DLSS 4.5 into 30 heavy-hitter games through a simple NVIDIA app toggle makes this a no-brainer for anyone currently running an RTX setup to try today.

On the developer front, RTX Mega Geometry solves what has secretly been Unreal Engine 5’s most embarrassing visual trade-off. By pushing the solution directly into Microsoft’s DXR 2.0 API, NVIDIA is effectively setting the benchmark for how the entire industry handles modern micro-geometry.

Still, there is an obvious catch. True Nanite ray tracing demands monstrous computational muscle. NVIDIA’s prominent positioning of RTX 5080-tier GeForce NOW streaming makes it clear: while the visual leap is real, it will quietly push mainstream hardware to its absolute limits and drive the next wave of expensive GPU upgrades.