New analysis confirms that NVIDIA's DLSS 4.5, utilizing the 2nd generation Transformer model, delivers significantly sharper visuals than DLSS 4.0 and AMD's FSR 4 Redstone. However, this visual upgrade comes with a critical performance trade-off for older hardware. According to testing by YouTuber @NikTek, only RTX 40 and RTX 50 series GPUs can fully leverage the new transformer model without significant penalties.

Specifically, the budget-friendly RTX 2060 suffers a nearly 7% performance loss in Cyberpunk 2077 when using the new DLSS Preset M compared to native TAA rendering. This creates a dilemma for gamers with older GeForce cards: they can achieve superior image clarity but at the cost of lower frame rates, sometimes even worse than running at native resolution. The findings highlight the growing computational demands of advanced AI upscaling technologies and the hardware generation gap in feature accessibility.