DLSS 3 frame rate booster could come to older Nvidia RTX GPUs – but don’t bet on it being soon

techradar.com:

Nvidia DLSS 3 is the company’s new take on frame rate boosting for RTX 4000 graphics cards – and it’s exclusively for those incoming next-gen GPUs – but there’s hope that the tech might come to older RTX GPUs at a later date. Well, sort of, though we’re not overly convinced Nvidia will be in a rush here…

This comes from something Tom’s Hardware(opens in new tab) picked up, namely an exchange between the denizens of Twitter and Nvidia’s Vice President of Applied Deep Learning Research, Bryan Catanzaro.

It’s theoretically possible that with additional research and engineering that we could get this technology working on other cards, although it wouldn’t provide as much benefit. The current version only works on 4000-series cards.September 20, 2022

As you can see, in reply to a question on DLSS 3 about whether there’s “any hope for RTX 20/30 owners to use this tech at some point”, Catanzaro delivers a somewhat cagey response.

While it’s theoretically possible, Catanzaro makes clear, the VP also makes it sound a little like the additional toil may not be worth the effort.

At least we now know that this is a possibility, which is good news. However, elsewhere in that Twitter thread, the Nvidia VP talks about why DLSS 3 is RTX 4000-only. Namely that it relies on the OFA (Optical Flow Accelerator) to do a lot of heavy lifting, and while that’s in Ampere GPUs (and Turing, RTX 2000, for that matter), it has been “significantly improved” for RTX 4000 graphics cards. Which is a key part of DLSS 3 running smoothly.

As we observed above, Catanzaro’s response feels like it’s carefully pitched not to upset current-gen GPU owners (or those with RTX 2000 cards), while making it sound on the more unlikely side that this will happen. At least