Jensen Huang took to the CES stage on Monday to share the latest from NVIDIA, and while the presentation was more a refresher of technologies the company has been working on for the past few years, there were a couple of notable announcements.
NVIDIA announced Alpamayo, a family of open-source reasoning models designed to guide autonomous vehicles through difficult driving situations. The centerpiece of the release is Alpamayo 1 , a 10-billion parameter chain-of-thought system NVIDIA says is capable of approaching driving more like a human being would. The model works by breaking down unexpected driving situations into a smaller set of problems before finding the safest path forward. At each step of the way, the model can explain its reasoning.
A sister model named AlpaSim allows developers to do closed-loop training for driving scenarios that are rarely encountered in real life. Huang said the 2025 Mercedes Benz CLA will be the first vehicle to ship with NVIDIA’s entire AV stack, including Alpamayo. “Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck, will be autonomous,” Huang said.
Following the Alpamayo announcements, a pair of BD-1 droids from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order joined Huang on stage. We saw one join the executive at last year’s CES. After that, Huang turned to Vera Rubin. NVIDIA first announced the GPU architecture in 2024, and now the company has begun production on a super computer that makes use of the new tech. One Vera CPU has 88 custom Olympus cores and 1.5TB of system memory for a total of 227 billion transistors. Meanwhile, one Rubin GPU features 336 billion transistors. Each Vera Rubin supercomputer has a pair of both components.
Following the presentation, NVIDIA held a separate briefing where it announced DLSS 4.5 and G-Sync Pulsar. The latest version of NVIDIA’s upscaling technology was trained on a second-generation transformer model, which should reduce ghosting and shimmering, leading to a more stable image, even when there’s a lot of movement on screen. As part of DLSS 4.5, NVIDIA is also adding support for 6x multi-frame and dynamic generation. The two features will arrive sometime in the spring. The former allows a 50-series GPU to generate five frames for every traditionally rendered frame. The idea here is to allow a powerful GPU like the RTX 5090 to saturate a 4K, 240HZ display with as many frames as possible. Dynamic frame generation, meanwhile, is exactly what it sounds like. DLSS 4.5 can dynamically scale the number of generated frames to fit the scenario. In demanding scenes, your 50-series GPU will generate more frames, while scaling back during less hectic ones so it only computes what it needs.
As for G-Sync Pulsar, it’s the latest improvement to NVIDIA’s flicker reduction technology. By pulsing a display’s backlight, NVIDIA says it can deliver perceived motion clarity relative to 1,000Hz, leading to greater clarity. Those same displays will also ship with the ability to automatically adjust their brightness and color temperature to ambient lighting conditions. Pre-orders for the first batch of G-Sync Pulsar displays will open on January 7.
Update 01/06/26 9:30AM: Added information about DLSS 4.5 and G-SYNC Pulsar.
