Nvidia promised the second-gen transformer denoiser in August. It never said the DLLs would arrive before the announcement.
DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction is out in the wild ahead of its official rollout. The files surfaced in the PC beta of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, and the community tool DLSS Swapper has now bundled them, which means anyone with an RTX card can drop the new denoiser into a supported game today rather than waiting for Nvidia to flip the switch.
The build doing the rounds is 310.7.12. Nvidia announced this model at Computex and put it on an August schedule, and the GeForce On Community Update streaming out of Gamescom today at 8am Pacific is the obvious slot for the formal release. The leak just got there first.
What the second-gen transformer actually buys you #
Ray Reconstruction is the part of the DLSS stack that cleans up ray-traced and path-traced frames, filling in the pixels where too few rays landed. Nvidia replaced the hand-tuned denoisers with a transformer model in DLSS 4; this is that model’s second generation.
The numbers Nvidia gives are specific and worth reading carefully. The new network chews through roughly 35% more input data and carries about 20% more parameters, and it does both inside the same compute budget as the first-generation transformer. That is the interesting bit. A bigger model that costs the same to run is an architecture win rather than a brute-force one, and it explains why Nvidia is not promising a frame-rate change here.
It has also been trained on a wider dataset, which Nvidia says gives it better spatial awareness when it decides which engine data to trust. The claimed results are more stable fine detail in motion, more accurate lighting, and less ghosting. Developers get finer control over temporal accumulation too, which matters for the shimmer-versus-smear tradeoff that plagues fast camera movement.
Turning on Preset F early #
The new model runs as Preset F. DLSS Swapper ships the libraries but does not list that preset yet, so it needs a nudge: open the app’s Ray Reconstruction preset configuration, duplicate the Preset E block as Preset F, and restart. Igor’s Lab walked through the edit, and VideoCardz confirmed the files landed in the tool. The developer says a proper update is a few days out, at which point the manual step goes away.
The caveats nobody is putting in the headline #
Every image-quality claim above is Nvidia’s own. Nobody has published a controlled side-by-side against the first-gen model yet, and denoiser improvements are notoriously scene-dependent: a change that kills ghosting on a moving reflection can do nothing at all for a static interior. Wait for the frame captures before deciding how big this is.
Performance is expected to land roughly where the old Ray Reconstruction model did, so treat this as a quality update and nothing else. And hand-swapping DLLs into a competitive online shooter is a decision you own, not Nvidia — anti-cheat systems do not always take kindly to modified game files, whatever the file happens to be.
The upside is that Ray Reconstruction is not a 50-series feature. It runs on every GeForce RTX GPU, which makes this one of the rare Nvidia releases where a 2060 owner and a 5090 owner get the same upgrade on the same day. Assuming, that is, that the official day is today.