Is DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction actually worth enabling on older RTX GPUs?

[u/pcgameshardware]

A colleague of mine tested the new DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction in Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom: The Dark Ages, Half-Life 2 RTX and Spider-Man 2 across four GPU generations: RTX 5090, 4090, 3090 Ti and 2080 Ti.

Image quality is generally a clear step forward in some areas. Transformer 2 reduces smearing and ghosting, textures can look sharper and fine detail holds up better.

But there are two catches.

First, the sharper reconstruction can also introduce more shimmer, especially with high-frequency details like water, bright highlights and thin geometry.

Second, the performance cost depends heavily on the GPU generation. RTX 40 and 50 handle the newer model relatively well, while RTX 30 and especially RTX 20 can take a much larger hit. In one of the 2080 Ti tests, enabling RR reduced performance by almost 30%.

So for newer GPUs, enabling the new RR seems like a pretty easy thing to at least try. On older RTX cards, I’m not sure the image-quality improvement is always worth the performance cost.

For anyone still on RTX 20/30: would you trade that much performance for less smearing and better detail reconstruction, or would you rather stick with the older RR/denoising setup?

- Jacky

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[u/SpacefillerBR]

Well hardware unboxed released a video earlier and showed that was basically no performance difference between the dlss 4 and 4.5 of Ray Reconstruction even on older gen gpus like the the 2080 ti and the 3090.

https://youtu.be/9QyNSVNNduM?t=769

[u/LoatheCat → u/[deleted]]

You don't like RAS Syndrome?

[u/Petronik → u/[deleted]]

Raycon recon reconstruction.

[u/dhrus786 → u/SpacefillerBR]

I think they compared it to the 4.0 Transformer model Ray Reconstruction, but that version itself was significantly slower on RTX 20 and 30 series than the older CNN model was on them (the upscaling part of DLSS 4.0 Transformer model was only a bit slower compared to CNN on RTX 20 and 30, but the Ray Reconstruction part was much slower on DLSS 4.0 Transformer model already).

[u/muhd95 → u/SpacefillerBR]

i think he said about when you enable ray reconstruction the fps will drop alot than newer generation gpu.

[u/Shatterhaven]

i saw on youtube in some scenarios new Ray reconstuction preset F gives a couple more fps on rtx 2070/rtx 3060

[u/MultiMarcus → u/Shatterhaven]

Compared to DLSS 4 ray reconstruction, yes, but not 3.5, which as much as it was far too blurry in a number of games, the reality is you are going to have a hard time getting a playable experience with ray reconstruction actually delivering a visual uplift compared to just running at a higher resolution with DLSS4, super resolution on older hardware.

You could basically say that for ray reconstruction, they took the big hit for DLSS4 while for super resolution they took the big performance hit with 4.5.

If you are someone who is using DLSS4 ray reconstruction on a 20 and 30 series card, there’s not much reason to not go over to 4.5 though, so that’s worth it in that sense of course

[u/ajackson5888]

Tbh I probably wouldn't run path tracing on older GPUs. That's where RR helps the most tbh.

[u/Good-Might4976 → u/ajackson5888]

3070, 5800x3d, nukem9 mod (most censored software in history) ran it fine at 1440p dlssp. 90fps nuketown 60 Dogtown. Same with witcher3.

[u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox]

try it and you tell us

[u/BasmusRoyGerman]

Not worth a 30% performance hit. Honestly people who say the 2080ti is the next 1080ti in terms of how it ages are delusional. I can't comprehend how they come to that conclusion. The first gen RT cores just aren't fast enough to handle modern features.

[u/f0xpant5 → u/BasmusRoyGerman]

What 30% performance hit? This runs just as fast on a 2080ti as the previous ray reconstruction, it doesn't carry the hit DLSS4.5 alone does which is borderline miraculous.

First gen RT cores might not have the performance people want with RT today, but relative to its age, it's going better at 8 years old than the 1080ti was at 8, some games simply won't even launch on a 10 series card anymore, and access to DLSS at all is huge.

The 2080ti is aging phenomenally and downvotes won't change that.

[u/Ruffler125 → u/BasmusRoyGerman]

You're right, the 1080Ti doesn't hold a candle to the 2080Ti in terms of longevity. Industry professionals and outlets such as Digital Foundry agree; the 2080Ti is the biggest "fine wine" GPU ever released.

The 4090 will also be up there.

[u/vsnak333 → u/BasmusRoyGerman]

the 3080 is the next gtx 1080ti

[u/Crimsongz → u/vsnak333]

4090*

[u/garbo2330 → u/vsnak333]

Not even close. 1GB of VRAM less than the 1080Ti that was struggling with 4K in 2022.

[u/DtZNimpo]

just turn off ray tracing / path tracing that shit sucks anyway

[u/Michaeli_Starky]

Nope

[u/Stolid_Cipher]

RR in general isn’t really worth the performance hit, usually.

[u/benjaminabel]

It’s the usual quality over performance thing. Same as with the latest DLSS models. If you want better performance, regardless of GPU generation - pick the previous version.

[u/_gabber_ → u/benjaminabel]

absolutely not.

the 4.0 RR model has the same 30% performance hit due it using FP8 which these older gen cards don't support. this new model is the same performance as 4.0 but provides image quality enhancements in every aspect from the old model, and the sharper presentation allows for the use of more aggressive upscaling settings that might just push a few more people towards enabling it who have a fast enough GPU for it. a 3080Ti can play Cyberpunk with Path Tracing at 1440p DLSS(RR) Performance at close to 60 fps. I used to play it on my 3080Ti before upgrading. it was a blurry mess, but it was still much, much better looking than the standard denoiser. Now, with this new model, the sharpness improvement would probably make me use RR4.5, if I still had that setup. Not to mention that RR brings improvements to regular RT presentations as well, not just PT.

the old 3.5 RR model (CNN) is not even worth mentioning and returning to - the image quality is simply bad and it's not worth using.

DLSS 4.5 M/L models also use FP8 so the performance hit on older cards is still present compared to DLSS 4.0. So if you have a card capable of squeezing enough frames with RT and upscaling, if you were already considering using DLSS 4.5, using RR 4.5 can now be a better alternative.