NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction improves path tracing

In layman terms, DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction is supposed to make path-traced lighting settle into place more quickly and remain stable when the camera starts moving. This is important because path tracing can look wonderful in screenshots, only for fine details, reflections or shadows to become noticeably “unrefined” when viewed in motion.

On Cyberpunk and Alan Wake 2

NVIDIA provided an early driver that I could test with our GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition (alongside an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and 32GB of RAM) on Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2, and my immediate impression is that this new Ray Reconstruction is a noticeable improvement. To be sure, it doesn’t make both games look any different, and I doubt I would have noticed every change without switching between the old and new models. Once I knew where to look, though, it became harder to go back to the old model.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the improvements were the easiest to spot, which is hardly surprising considering how NVIDIA has used the game to showcase DLSS and path tracing over the years. With the older Ray Reconstruction model, certain floors and darker surfaces could look restless as I moved the camera, almost as if the game was still deciding what detail should be visible. The new model settles these surfaces more quickly, while reflections and fine patterns also remain clearer in motion.

It’s not a gamechanger, if I have to be honest, and it’s very easy not to notice the improvements in the middle of a frantic shootout. But does it make the game look prettier? Oh yes. Smearing across reflective surfaces was less obvious, and fine details did not break up as readily when I turned the camera.

Alan Wake 2 showed the same results, particularly around moving characters and the fine detail on wooden floors. The faint trails that can appear around feet and limbs were less obvious, while background textures held together better. It’s not perfect, however, as I could still see some artefacts around fast-moving objects. Path-traced graphics are not completely solved, then, but the new Ray Reconstruction model appears to be dealing with their messier moments more effectively. I also suspect that future drivers will resolve many of these issues eventually.

No performance sacrifice

Path tracing itself remains extremely taxing on GPUs, but it’s worth mentioning that there wasn’t any meaningful performance hit when I tested DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction on the above two games. The caveat here is that two titles are admittedly a very small sample, so it is too early to say whether this will be true across every supported game and GPU. Still, the new model appears to deliver its cleaner and more stable image without demanding noticeably more performance than the previous version – which makes leaving it enabled an easy decision. NVIDIA also says DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction is supported on older GeForce RTX cards all the way down to the 20 Series, but performance will vary depending on the game’s visual settings and the resolution it is played on.

At the moment, 30 games will support DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction including Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Doom: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Hogwarts Legacy, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Star Wars Outlaws. Developers will also be able to add the new model directly through future game updates.