Nvidia's Free Ray Tracing Upgrade Brings Big Gains to RTX GPUs

Nvidia has rolled out its biggest leap in ray tracing technology in years, and it's free for every RTX GPU owner. The company unveiled DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction at Gamescom, a new model that combines upscaling and denoising into a single technology. This means Nvidia can tackle two of the most pressing problems in rendering with one solution.

The new model, now available as Preset F in the Nvidia App, replaces the DLSS 4.0-era Preset D and works across every RTX generation from Turing onward. Testing on an RTX 4070 Ti Super showed that the new Ray Reconstruction model delivers better lighting accuracy, stronger temporal stability, and clearer detail in ray-traced scenes.

The gains are particularly noticeable in reflective scenes, where the new model produces more convincing color and reflection. However, pushing the brightness too far can result in overly enthusiastic reflections. The performance comparison shows that there is no penalty for using the new model, with average FPS within 1% of variance.