The AI boom is affecting everything. And NVIDIA, they're the ones holding the big
bubble wand. And what did gamers get? Fake resolution and fake frames. Great.
But slowly but surely, NVIDIA has been
turning their DLSS upscaling and frame generation into legitimately useful
technologies. And with DLSS 4.5, the
GeForce team seems confident that they can turn me into a believer.
Seems like a bit of a long shot. So, what have they got? Well, for starters,
they claim that their upscaling is dramatically improved. I'm talking
better sharpness, better handling of lighting effects, and even better HDR
lighting, all with barely any performance overhead. Okay, that's a
pretty good start. And on top of that,
[snorts] 6x frame gen. Okay, was anybody
asking for that? No, but I also wasn't asking for dynamic
frame gen, which low-key might be the coolest thing NVIDIA has shown me in
years. It is literally a feature that they built to minimize the use of frame
gen, opting instead for real frames wherever possible and using frame gen to
fill in the gaps where it's needed. Holy crap, if that doesn't suck, I might turn
on frame gen. Finally, NVIDIA is launching G-Sync Pulsar, a technology
they first showed me 2 years ago that boosts motion clarity on IPS monitors in
a way that they claim makes them equivalent to 1,000 Hz refresh rate
clarity. I [music] don't really have a point of reference for that since I've
never seen a 1000Hz monitor yet. But
what I have seen is the segue to our sponsor, Delete Me. Stop data brokers
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first big new feature of DLSS 4.5 is NVIDIA's second generation transformer
AI model. And while it sounds like just an incremental improvement over the
transformer model that they debuted with the LSS4, apparently it was trained
using five times the compute of the previous model, resulting in image
quality that is more like a full generational leap forward and much
closer to what NVIDIA calls ground [music] truth. But I'll be the judge of
that and I can do so simply by pressing this hotkey and switching between the
two models. Wow. immediately. Boy, is
that ever a lot sharper,
which is not necessarily a good thing.
But to their credit, this does not look like just a sharpening filter. [music]
I can find spots where it might feel a little overdone, like maybe in some of
this wood grain, but I can also find spots where, good lord, is it ever
better. Like look at this foliage here. Holy crap. My first thought was maybe
the difference was so stark because we were also seeing the improvements to
frame gen. So we went ahead and turned it off and no, it's just that much
better. You'd never have known it before with all the boiling and artifacting,
but NVIDIA's models are trained on reference images that are rendered at
much much higher quality than a typical
realtime TAA game frame. And they have
shown in the past that in certain situations DLSS [music] is capable of
outputting better than native image quality, but I don't think I've ever
seen that in anything resembling a realworld gaming scenario. Now, there is
some performance overhead for this about 2 to 3%. So, the native rendering will
actually be at a bit of a lower frame rate, but NVIDIA is so confident in the
image quality of this new model that they figured I could turn it all the way
down to performance to juice up my frame rates and still get very solid image
quality. So, naturally, [music] I will be trying that.
Before, >> after.
Wait, wait, roll for a second. This one was already set to performance.
Are you kidding me right now? Hold on a second. It gets better. Okay, let's go
up to uh let's go up to quality.
I would say the biggest difference here [music] is that the older model is not
as bad at performance. The newer one
still looks a lot better. Oh, it's not
just [music] Okay, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Okay. Yeah, the before
and after isn't nearly as stark in terms of the boiling effect, [music] but there
are still some big differences. I mean, oh man, look at these particle effects.
Old, you can kind of see them around our character here. New, now they pop. And
in other parts of the scene, they basically go from disappearing
to existing. And this is a big one. I don't know if you're going to be able to
catch this on camera, but look at the comet trails behind all these leaves. It
reminds me of my Windows 95 mouse pointer. I switch over to the new model
and they're still there a little bit, but it is way better. So, what's the
downside at the moment? Kind of hard to find one. The performance is going to
depend on the speed of your GPU's neural processor, but NVIDIA is allowing DLSS
4.5 to be enabled on any RTX GPU. So,
it's at the point now where even if you hate DLSS, you should probably at least
try it in your favorite games before you dismiss it outright. And you can do so
almost immediately starting tomorrow. This new Transformer model will be able
to be forced on via the NVIDIA app in the over 400 games that now support DLSS
with in-game menu integration trickling out over the coming months. Now, for the
[music] bad news. DLSS 4.5 also includes
new frame generation features that [music] in this case are exclusive to 50
series. >> I know, I know. But I mean, come on.
Does anyone even want 5x and 6x frame gen? That is up to five generated fake
frames for every single natively rendered frame. I am going to need to
try this.
There's definitely artifacts around hard edges. You get a little bit of that
almost like heat distortion ripple effect and not all the lighting looks
quite right. Bit of weirdness in the aliasing,
but to their credit, it looks pretty darn good. Of course, this is like an
ideal scenario at a slowmoving idle camera here. There's no way they're
going to let me move the character.
Oh, I can just move the character. I can move the character. I'm going to move
the character. All right. 6x frame gen.
It's pretty good. What the hell? Um,
one of the big improvements is that without needing [music] any developer
input, they can account for uh UI elements much much better. So, you can
actually see the odd little bit of weirdness. Like, you can see there's
like a bit of yellow behind this, like the the leaves when I'm too close to it,
but not much. Like, look at that. It's almost translucent. You know what? I
think that might have even just been my eyes playing tricks [music] on me because there's a little bit of yellow
light cast here. And I thought it was I thought it was grabbing something else.
No, the the translucency of the [music] HUD elements is really good. I can still
make it do kind of funky stuff on my compass when I [music] rapidly change
direction. So, the dial has to go the
other way, but I got to really look for it. Even if
they can fix the image quality, though, one of the big concerns with multi frame
gen is latency. And NVIDIA's own marketing acknowledges an increase of 5
to 7 milliseconds between 4x frame gen and 6x frame gen in Blackmth Wukong. So
that's on top of the latency increase that you've already got. Which raises
the question of but why though? Well, as
it turns out, multiframe gen was just a stepping stone to dynamic frame gen,
which legitimately sounds super cool. I
mean, the paradox around frame gen has always been that if you want the best
frame gen experience, you need a pretty solid base frame rate. And if you have a
solid base frame rate, why would you accept the trade-offs in image quality
and perceived responsiveness that you get for activating frame gen? The
solution? Only generate frames when you
need them. I mean, we've all been there. You've got the GPU hutzpa to match your
monitor's 240 Hz refresh rate while you're looking at your feet in a
hallway, but then an opponent shows up.
and all of a sudden they're firing particle weapons at you and everything's
flying around and well, dynamic frame gen is designed to step in and keep your
FPS locked to your display's refresh rate to reduce unsavory stutters.
Let's go try it. They didn't have a demo that was quite what we wanted, so we
played around with the settings on this one. We're playing The Outer Worlds 2 on an RTX 5060 Ti. And you can see here
that we've got it set so that when we're in a more confined space and we don't
have a whole bunch of wild stuff going on, we're running at 1x, which is to say
no frame gen. But as we go out into more
demanding environments, you can see our frame gen will pick up and fill in any
of the blanks. So that allows us to hit 1440p
120 FPS, which matches what we've set our monitor to. Lionus, can you tell at
all when it's turning on or off? >> It's exactly what I'm trying to figure out right now. Okay, here. Let's Let's
teamwork this. >> I suspect that right now it is not.
>> It is on. >> It's on. Damn.
Okay, it's definitely off now. >> Yes.
>> Okay. Did it just transition? I think it just transitioned. I think it's off.
>> It never turned on. >> Really? >> Yeah. As far as this thing's recording.
Okay, this right here is the reason for
existing that this technology was looking for. Like, I'll be the first to
poo poo a fake frame, but if the question becomes, would you rather a
dropped frame? Well, now you got my attention. I drop anything [music] but
frames. [laughter]
So then, how should it be configured? Well, NVIDIA will allow you to target
whatever frame rate you want, but what they recommend is locking your frame
rate to your monitor's refresh rate. See, with native rendering, there can be
a benefit to outputting more frames than your monitor can display. It can lower
your latency, but frame gen is not going to lower your latency. And by locking to
your monitor refresh rate, you can also reduce the odds of looking at a
generated frame when you could have been looking at a real one. By the way, since
we're here at CES, I asked the folks about Reflex 2 and new GPUs. Uh, to
which NVIDIA replied, "Your mom."
Oh. Oh. Sorry. Sorry. It was mum's the
word. Which is equally unhelpful, but at
least more respectful.
Oh, what they do have though is G-Sync Pulsar. That's in a different room
though. In front of me are two identical systems. One with pulsar disabled. So
this is the traditional way where we see the blurring that is caused by pixel
transitions and the second with their backlight strobing which has the
increased clarity that you would expect from a strobing display.
I wasn't supposed to get into the impressions part right away. There was a
little scripted thing that I wanted to do. But um
wow. To your credit, it doesn't kill the brightness the way that previous
strobing techs have. That's pretty cool.
But [music] how does it work? Well, as I alluded to before, LCD displays don't
have the near instantaneous pixel response times that OLEDs do. And one
trick that you can use to reduce blur and to improve motion clarity, is to
strobe the backlight, effectively not lighting up the pixel during that
transition period. But hm, if you want
to have variable refresh rate, which improves perceived animation smoothness,
then the flicker of doing this can get very distracting, especially at lower
FPS. So, pulsar equipped displays have
numerous horizontal backlight sections that pulse consecutively from top to
bottom, almost like how a CRT would create an image on screen by drawing
lines super quickly. The benefit of this is that unlike the old way where they
would scan out and then strobe the entire display, meaning that the top
pixels were actually displayed for longer than the bottom ones, this allows
all pixels to be strobed for the same amount of time. They also apparently
what you strobe them four times per change.
four times per change, which is supposed to give you theoretically four times the
motion clarity, which would be equivalent to a thousand hertz. Again, I
can't speak to that. Never tried a 1000 Hz display. But what I can say is, yeah,
the motion clarity looks great. The only question is
why OLED displays do exist. You guys, you
guys know that, right? >> Well, yes, they do. But the way of
implementing this kind of strobing on OLED is black frame insertion, which can
be pretty distracting. And I gotta say, um, to NVIDIA's credit, this doesn't
have the same kind of dim, flickery feel
to my eyes that previous ulmbrame
insertion solutions have had. It's uh,
yeah, pretty damn impressive. Finally, NVIDIA also added a light
sensor that will automatically adjust brightness and or color temperature of
your display depending on your room's surrounding, which is um
that's cool, I guess. And then this is the part where I was supposed to try the
demo, but I already did. And uh it's
pretty cool. It's going to be available on select monitors from AOC, ASUS, MSI,
and Acer, starting in just a couple of days, which is on the 7th, which [music]
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If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy the last time that I sort of begrudgingly
accepted that [music] something NVIDIA made was good. Um, when we tried out
GeForce Now recently. It's gotten a lot better.
>> [music]