Nvidia DLSS 3.0 may not require an RTX 4000 GPU after all

pcgamesn.com:

The raw performance of the RTX 4000 series is shaping up to be reason enough to pick up team green’s newest GPUs, but Nvidia DLSS 3.0 with its new ‘Frame Generation’ features remains an equally eye-catching temptation. However, despite the company insisting that the technology will only be compatible with Lovelace pixel pushers, it may not require a new graphics card after all.

Reddit user JusDax has been spending some time with the new Cyberpunk 2077 build that features Nvidia DLSS 3.0, and claims to have unlocked the Frame Generation feature for older RTX GPUs. They say that all it took was “adding a config file to remove the VRAM overhead in Cyberpunk”, after which they were enjoying around 80fps on an RTX 2070.

While JusDax understandably celebrates this easy way to boost fps without needing the best graphics card, they are quick to caveat that the experience isn’t perfect. Their tinkering apparently causes “instability and frame drops”, likely due to the 2000 series card lacking the new Optical Flow Accelerator found on the likes of the RTX 4090.

Given the lack of video evidence, we should take JusDax’s claims here with a healthy dose of salt, but this may hopefully indicate that the rule of Nvidia DLSS 3.0 only working on RTX 4000 GPUs may only be short-lived. As we note in our RTX 4090 review, the technology is seriously impressive when it works, and it’d be great to see it shared across the generations of GeForce graphics cards.