Now Nvidia's hardware blocks have been AI'd out of existence all it will take for Frame Generation support on RTX 20- and 30-series GPUs is 'further optimization and testing'

pcgamer.com:

A lot of things are going to change when Nvidia's new RTX Blackwell cards launch this month, with a bunch of it coming to existing cards as well as the RTX 50-series. But will one of those changes see DLSS Frame Generation coming to the Ampere-based RTX 30-series? It's possible, because now we're just talking about «further optimization and testing» rather than dedicated hardware locks.

Previously, the main reason given for Nvidia's Frame Generation feature to be locked to the RTX 40-series of cards was that it had dropped in an enhanced lump of silicon into the new Ada GPUs. The optical flow accelerator was key to Nvidia's Frame Gen being something more stable and accurate than the sort of interpolation used by other systems.

But the RTX 30-series optical flow units weren't as capable, and so Nvidia chose to hardware-lock the feature to the RTX 40-series, and above.

The situation has changed now, as the new frame generation model no longer makes use of the optical flow accelerator hardware at all and has been entirely replaced by a more efficient AI model. Alongside the frame generation AI model, the optical flow AI model helps reduce the computational cost of generating these in between frames, with a touted 30% reduction in VRAM usage and a potential 10% uplift in overall frame rates.

And this isn't just when it comes to the new Multi Frame Generation feature of the RTX Blackwell cards, either. This new model is rolling out across any game that currently supports Frame Generation, whether by native integration by the game devs or via the DLSS Override settings in the Nvidia App.

The obvious question from that is if the hardware-blockage which stopped the RTX 30-series from using the Frame Generation feature is being AI'd out of existence, why can't we have nice things on the older cards, too?

I put that question to Nvidia myself and it turns out that there are no hardware reasons that it cannot work.

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