Nvidia's DLSS 4.5 looks great and all but I'm surprised at just how much extra power it demands from your graphics card
Nvidia's big thing for gamersTM from CES this year has been the announcement and rapid release of DLSS 4.5. But, while all the noise I've seen has been about either confusion on the different model presets or the image stability enhancements (and occasional failures) it delivers, I've been surprised at just how much more computationally demanding it is. DLSS 4.5 can draw a ton more power from your graphics card.
Nick has been going to town testing DLSS 4.5 since the Nvidia App beta released, running presets across different games and across both an RTX 5090 and an RTX 3060 Ti, just to see how hefty the performance difference is between the GPU generations. While editing his article I've been scrubbing through the video benchmarks on the page, and while you're not always seeing a huge performance difference in terms of frame rates, you're often seeing a big delta between the power draw of the two DLSS models.
That there is a power differential at all isn't a surprise; when Nvidia introduced DLSS 4 at CES 2025 it explained the transformer model had allowed it to be more computationally expensive than the convolutional neural network model, and so it was using four times more compute than CNN. With DLSS 4.5, Nvidia has upped the ante again, and the godfather of DLSS, Brian Catanzaro, noted this year that it now uses five times more GPU compute.
But I didn't expect that to quite translate to the extra wattage levels Nick's been regularly seeing during his testing. Those Nvidia Tensor cores sure are working overtime now, and you can see in Cyberpunk 2077, especially with the RTX 5090, that sometimes the card is drawing as much as 50 W more than with just DLSS 4. It's most noticeable in the Model L (Ultra Performance) preset, but it's not because you're getting way higher frame rates—those are regularly lower precisely because it's more computationally demanding.
You can also see that same level of extra power draw in Spider Man Remastered and in Stalker 2 (though to a slightly lesser extent). What is worth noting here is that the Spidey and Stalker tests aren't quite like-for-like, while the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark is pretty much identical.
The RTX 3060 Ti, too, is often drawing more power with DLSS 4.5 than with DLSS 4, though obviously the lower power GPU isn't going to be sucking down an extra 50 W.
I mean, none of this is really going to stop me from using it. The extra level of stability the new transformer model regularly offers on an image basis does seem to be worth it, even if you are going to be paying for it. That's especially true if you're running at 4K—the Performance mode now has such impressive image quality at that level with a 1080p input resolution that I'd be happy shifting from Quality or Balanced to get those fps performance gains.
And, if you're rocking an RTX 5090 already then chances are you're not super concerned about the level of extra power draw on offer. Well, unless you fear for your toasty power cables anyways.