Plenty of issues are going to vary when Nvidia’s new RTX Blackwell playing cards launch this month, with a bunch of it coming to present playing cards in addition to the RTX 50-series. But will a kind of modifications see DLSS Frame Generation coming to the Ampere-based RTX 30-series? It’s doable, as a result of now we’re simply speaking about “additional optimization and testing” somewhat than devoted {hardware} locks.
Previously, the principle purpose given for Nvidia’s Frame Generation characteristic to be locked to the RTX 40-series of playing cards was that it had dropped in an enhanced lump of silicon into the brand new Ada GPUs. The optical circulation accelerator was key to Nvidia’s Frame Gen being one thing extra steady and correct than the form of interpolation utilized by different programs.
But the RTX 30-series optical circulation models weren’t as succesful, and so Nvidia selected to hardware-lock the characteristic to the RTX 40-series, and above.
The state of affairs has modified now, as the brand new body era mannequin not makes use of the optical circulation accelerator {hardware} in any respect and has been fully changed by a extra environment friendly AI mannequin. Alongside the body era AI mannequin, the optical circulation AI mannequin helps scale back the computational value of producing these in between frames, with a touted 30% discount in VRAM utilization and a possible 10% uplift in total body charges.
And this is not simply on the subject of the brand new Multi Frame Generation characteristic of the RTX Blackwell playing cards, both. This new mannequin is rolling out throughout any sport that at the moment helps Frame Generation, whether or not by native integration by the sport devs or by way of the DLSS Override settings within the Nvidia App.
The apparent query from that’s if the hardware-blockage which stopped the RTX 30-series from utilizing the Frame Generation characteristic is being AI’d out of existence, why cannot we’ve got good issues on the older playing cards, too?
I put that query to Nvidia myself and it seems that there aren’t any {hardware} causes that it can’t work.
“DLSS Frame Generation was designed and optimized for RTX 40 Series and later,” says Nvidia. “Support for earlier GPU architectures would take additional optimization and testing.”
So, ‘all’ it takes is a few optimisation to get the characteristic engaged on the RTX 30-series, and perhaps even the RTX 20-series provided that these GPUs, too, include the Tensor Cores required for the precise nuts and bolts of the Frame Generation calculations. There are efficiency variations between these Tensor Cores and the models contained in the RTX 40-series, so that is definitely no tacit admission that Frame Gen is coming to older playing cards, simply that it might want some tweaking and testing by Nvidia to make sure that it is in a match state for launch.
What I might say is that I do know Nvidia has been messing round with the RTX 30-series and Frame Generation for some time now, probably extra significantly when it first began working with the AI-replacement for the optical circulation accelerator. For me, that makes it extra probably we’ll see a possible fillip for RTX 30-series people down the road.
Nvidia, nonetheless, would probably say it solely desires to launch such an replace ought to the characteristic be robust sufficient on the older playing cards. And, granted, Frame Generation works its greatest whenever you’ve already bought body charges of round 60 fps+ with out it, so in the event you have been hoping that such an replace would all of a sudden make your RTX 3060 a monster we in all probability have to have a chat.
The flip facet of that, nonetheless, is that AMD’s agnostic body era characteristic is already being utilized by a ton of RTX 30-series homeowners to good impact. And, whereas it might not ship the form of picture high quality DLSS Frame Generation can ship natively, customers are usually proud of getting themselves some greater body charges free of charge.
What has Nvidia bought to lose by providing the brand new characteristic to present customers, then? Well, in the event you take a look at the RTX 50-series line up you can make the case that it is there particularly for RTX 20- and 30-series homeowners by way of the improve cycle. And in the event you simply hand over a free pace increase to these avid gamers are they going to be as keen to drop a ton of money on a complete new graphics card?
