What is DLSS Multi Frame Generation?

DLSS Multi Frame Generation is the “killer app” for NVIDIA RTX 50-series GPUs, as it has the potential to dramatically increase performance in supported games and is exclusive to the RTX 50-series. It’s the company’s second-generation frame generation technology, which it initially launched with the RTX 40-series in 2022. That technology, which is just called DLSS Frame Generation, has now been improved for NVIDIA’s newest GPUs, and the new version is called DLSS Multi Frame Generation.

The big difference between the two versions is the original DLSS Frame Generation was able to generate one frame for every two real frames that were rendered, and the new version can generate up to three frames. Accordingly, NVIDIA touted up to a 4x increase in frame rates with the first version, and is now claiming an astonishing 8x improvement in frames per second. As one example of how this translates to actual performance, the company provided a demo of Dune: Awakening showing it running at 75 fps at 4K with no DLSS, and then at around 275 fps with DLSS 4.

The original version of this technology used a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a hardware-based “flow accelerator” to analyze two rendered frames and drop an AI-generated frame in between them. The new version works roughly the same way, but uses a new transformer model and ditches the flow accelerator and leans heavily on the 50-series' Tensor Cores, and instead of dropping one frame in between the two “real” frames it can now drop several frames. Critics are bemoaning these as “fake frames” since they're AI-generated, but what really matters is how it feels to play a game using it. Therefore, if NVIDIA can generate this many frames without a noticeable degradation of image quality and latency, most people likely won’t mind.

What people do mind when it comes to this technology however, is the latency it introduces into the rendering process. The system has to wait for the GPU to analyze and render the generated frames, which translates to the user as latency. However, NVIDIA has also introduced a technology called Reflex to help combat this effect, which syncs the CPU and GPU pipelines to minimize it. For the RTX 50-series and Multi Frame Generation, NVIDIA has announced the second version of this technology as well, called Reflex 2.

Whether or not the latency is still perceptible or bad enough to make frame generation not worth it depends on personal taste. Early looks at DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation with Reflex 2 enabled show latency peaking at around 60ms, which is roughly the same as what it was with the original frame generation technology, so even though performance has improved, latency has roughly stayed the same, and it seems to be manageable. Digital Foundry did a deep dive into this topic if you have 15 minutes to spare.

In general, there will always be a latency penalty to frame generation, but NVIDIA is making attempts to mitigate it, and they seem to be pretty effective, though this won’t stop people from complaining about “fake frames.” However, if your perception of the framerate is “real,” it should be fine for gaming. NVIDIA has also stated it plans to further increase the number of frames it is generating in future games, saying 1,000HZ gaming will be possible but only with even more frame generation. NVIDIA has also gone on the record saying in the future it might be able to generate up to 16 frames at a time, but will only do so if it "benefits the gaming experience," accordingto Wccftech.

Wrapping up, NVIDIA's DLSS Multi Frame Generation has the potential to more than double performance in some games, which is the biggest caveat to the technology; frame generation has to be coded into the game. NVIDIA says there will be 75 games that support it when the 50-series cards launch, with more to come throughout the year.