NVIDIA's GeForce Driver Brings DLSS 4.5 and 6X Frame Generation to Modern Warfare 4
NVIDIA's new GeForce Game Ready driver pairs DLSS 4.5 with Modern Warfare 4, Gears of War: E-Day and three more October PC launches, adding 6X frame generation.
NVIDIA released a new GeForce Game Ready Driver on October 6, version 617.42 WHQL, and it lands squarely in front of the busiest stretch of PC releases this month. The headline recipient is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, which gets full DLSS 4.5 support ahead of its October 16 campaign early access, but the same driver also unlocks the technology in Gears of War: E-Day, STAR WARS: Galactic Racer and two more titles arriving over the next week.
What DLSS 4.5 actually adds
DLSS 4.5 is NVIDIA's latest revision of its upscaling and frame generation suite, and the driver spreads its three components unevenly across the GeForce lineup. Super Resolution, the upscaling layer, runs on effectively any RTX card. Frame Generation, which inserts a single AI-generated frame between rendered ones, is available from the RTX 40 series onward. The newest piece, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, is restricted to RTX 50 series hardware and can insert up to five extra frames for every one rendered, scaling its multiplier up and down automatically to hold a target frame rate rather than running at a fixed ratio. NVIDIA Reflex, which trims input latency rather than adding frames, ships across all three tiers.
That split matters for anyone deciding whether this driver is worth chasing: the biggest number on NVIDIA's slides, "up to 6X," is an RTX 50-only figure. Owners of RTX 40 and 30 series cards still get Frame Generation or Super Resolution gains, just not the dynamic multiplier.
Modern Warfare 4 leads the rollout
Modern Warfare 4's campaign opens in early access on October 16 for pre-order customers, with the full release, including multiplayer and DMZ, following on October 23. According to NVIDIA's own rollout notes, the game launches with DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution across every mode, RTX 40 series Frame Generation, RTX 50 series Dynamic Multi Frame Generation at up to 6X, and Reflex latency reduction on all GeForce RTX hardware. Infinity Ward's PC build also ships with an ultrawide and HDR option, which NVIDIA highlighted separately as part of the same push.
Gears of War: E-Day sets the benchmark
The driver's other flagship is The Coalition's Gears of War: E-Day, which launched the same day with ray tracing, RTX Mega Geometry and the full DLSS 4.5 stack. NVIDIA's own first-party testing, run on a Ryzen 9800X3D with 64GB of RAM, shows the gap the 6X multiplier makes at native 4K with ray tracing and RTX Mega Geometry on the Ultra preset: an RTX 5090 averages 410 frames per second, an RTX 5080 reaches 295, and an RTX 5070 Ti sits at 255. NVIDIA separately quotes a 7.5X average speedup over native rendering at 4K once the full DLSS 4.5 stack is engaged, with Reflex cutting PC latency by up to 50% in the company's own campaign benchmark.
The rest of October's DLSS 4.5 lineup
Three more releases round out the driver's game list. STAR WARS: Galactic Racer launched October 6 with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, Super Resolution and a DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction pass that NVIDIA says refines the game's ray-traced Lumen lighting. Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen follows on October 9 with a free update bringing Dynamic Multi Frame Generation and Super Resolution to the base game. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024's Sim Update 7, due October 13, upgrades the simulator's existing DLSS implementation to 4.5 and adds the Dynamic Multi Frame Generation option for RTX 50 series owners; NVIDIA's testing puts the scaling at up to 6.4X at 4K, close to the linear increase its engineers were targeting.
How to get it
The 617.42 WHQL driver is available now through the NVIDIA app and GeForce driver downloads page, and NVIDIA says the same DLSS 4.5 builds are rolling out to GeForce NOW Ultimate members for cloud streaming, so the frame generation gains aren't strictly limited to owners of RTX 50 series desktops. Players without the latest hardware still pick up Super Resolution improvements and, on RTX 40 series cards, standard Frame Generation, through the same driver install. Modern Warfare 4 is available to pre-purchase now on Steam and through Call of Duty's official site ahead of its October 16 early access window.
Official links
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