DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction arrives this month, and NVIDIA is doing something unusual: it gives it to every RTX card, including the 20 series released in 2018. A seven-year-old GeForce gets the same image upgrade as a 5090. That is not the house policy of recent years.
Ray Reconstruction across all four generations
NVIDIA publishes a compatibility table per series. It lists six technologies in the DLSS 4.5 suite and ticks the ones that work on each generation.
Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and Multi Frame Generation stay exclusive to the 50 series. Single Frame Generation stops at the 40 series. Ray Reconstruction, Super Resolution and DLAA anti-aliasing, however, are ticked on all four generations, 20 series included.
Ray Reconstruction is the piece that rebuilds lighting in ray-traced games. It replaces the game’s denoiser, the filter that cleans up the very grainy image produced by tracing light rays. That is what makes ray tracing watchable, and that is the piece moving forward.
DLSS 4.5: 35% more compute, at the same performance
The new model relies on a second-generation transformer architecture, the same family of neural networks as large language models. NVIDIA announces a denoiser that delivers 35% more compute capability and processes 20% more parameters, at no cost in frames per second compared with the previous model.
The claimed gains cover lighting accuracy, temporal stability and clarity in motion. Those are the classic flaws of denoised ray tracing: shimmering shadows, reflections that smear when the camera moves.
Twenty-seven games are compatible at launch. Among them Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, DOOM: The Dark Ages, Half-Life 2 RTX, Hogwarts Legacy, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Portal with RTX and Star Wars Outlaws. The update goes through the NVIDIA app, with no game reinstall. Blender will add the new denoiser in version 5.3 this autumn.
The list of games making the move goes beyond the twenty-seven at launch. Marvel Rivals, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, Duet Night Abyss and the first Gothic remake are switching to the new version, with Backrooms: Escape Together and CINDER CITY to follow. NVIDIA claims more than a thousand games and applications compatible with one or another piece of its suite, across all titles and generations.
Getting Ray Reconstruction does not turn an entry-level card into a ray tracing machine for all that. The technology improves the quality of what the card already computes, it does not raise its raw power. On a 20 series card, turning ray tracing on stays expensive; what changes is that the result will be cleaner.
The contrast with card prices
This free upgrade lands at the same time as another piece of news from the maker. Its flagship card, the RTX 5090, went from 1,999 to 4,930 dollars on its own store, under the effect of the memory shortage. The hardware is becoming unreachable while the software opens up to cards from 2018.
The two moves complement each other. When nobody can buy the new generation, extending the life of the old one keeps players in the stable. An RTX 3060 that gets better rendering in 2026 is a card you do not replace right away, and a user who stays on the maker’s tools.
The detail on prices and the shortage is in our article on the RTX 5090 at 4,930 dollars. Among the games adopting the technology, Phantom Blade Zero launches with it, and it just had its own State of Play. Valve, for its part, is preparing its hardware with the Steam Machine and Steam Frame expected this year.
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