At GTC, Nvidia introduced not only the first three cards of the Geforce RTX 4000, but also DLSS 3. One of the most important questions about the new expansion phase of Deep Learning Super Sampling is whether DLSS 3 is specific to RTX. -40 series or not? The short answer is yes, it is exclusive. The long answer is a bit more complicated.
Brian Catanzaro, vice president of Applied Deep Learning Research at Nvidia, confirmed that DLSS 3 in its current form only works on the Geforce RTX 4000. According to him, it is theoretically possible that even older generations will be supplied with DLSS 3. Theoretically – whether Nvidia will ever bring DLSS3 to RTX 30 (amperes), RTX 20 (Turing) or even older cards is rather questionable. According to Catanzaro, DLSS 3 doesn’t offer any major benefits for owners of older Geforce graphics cards.
Does DLLS 3 run on Geforce RTX 3000 (Turing) and RTX 2000 (Ampere)? (2)
Source: Nvidia
Background Ada Lovelace has Tensor Core, the latest generation codenamed and optical flow accelerator. Both Turings are already on the cards, but they’ve been vastly improved with Lovelace, according to Nvidia. At the moment, the main prerequisites are high throughput values and performance factors that the units now have to achieve. This probably means a performance penalty for DLSS 3 on older cards. Whether it is dramatic or not, only time will tell. Until then, Nvidia’s marketing statements remain unanswered in the room. For example, the optical flow accelerator is said to exceed the performance of its predecessor by 2 to 2.5 times. According to Nvidia, DLSS frame generation is supported only in Lovelace.
| DLSS 3 Sub Facility | GPU hardware support |
|---|---|
| DLSS frame generation | GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU |
| DLSS Super Resolution (aka DLSS 2) | GeForce RTX 20/30/40 Series GPU |
| nvidia reflex | GeForce 900 Series and newer GPU |
As an example: XeSS from Intel runs hardware-accelerated on Arc graphics cards, but works even without this hardware acceleration. Independent tests still have to show how big the performance penalty is. However, it shows that new technologies can certainly be introduced inclusively, even if older or non-optimized hardware yields poor results.
Also worth reading: Radeon Clearance: RX 6600 XT to RX 6950 XT Prices Drop After RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 Revealed
With DLSS 3, however, Nvidia also included reflex in the overall picture and would be counterproductive if older hardware performed poorly, while on the other hand latency was declared a moot point. Maybe Nvidia is still at a loss like G-Sync and is offering DLSS3 as a “lite version” over Ampere and Turing. You’ll find out from us when the time comes.
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