Does DLSS 3 run on the Geforce RTX 3000 (Ampere) and RTX 2000 (Turing)?
At the GTC, Nvidia not only presented the first three cards of the Geforce RTX 4000, but also DLSS 3. One of the most important questions that arises about the new expansion stage of Deep Learning Super Sampling is whether DLSS 3 is exclusive to the RTX-40 series is or not? The short answer is yes, it’s exclusive. The long answer is a bit more complicated.
Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President of Applied Deep Learning Research at Nvidia, confirmed that in its current form DLSS 3 only works on the Geforce RTX 4000. According to him, it is theoretically possible that older generations will also be supplied with DLSS 3. Theoretically – whether Nvidia will ever bring DLSS 3 to the RTX 30 (Ampere), RTX 20 (Turing) or even older cards is rather questionable. According to Catanzaro, DLSS 3 does not offer any major advantages for owners of older Geforce graphics cards.
Does DLLS 3 run on the Geforce RTX 3000 (Turing) and RTX 2000 (Ampere)? (2)
Source: Nvidia
The background are the tensor cores in Ada Lovelace, the code name of the latest generation, and the Optical Flow Accelerator. Both already exist on Turing cards, but with Lovelace they have been improved immensely, according to Nvidia. At the moment, the main stipulations are the higher throughput values and performance factors that the units are now supposed to achieve. This probably means a performance penalty for DLSS 3 on older cards. How dramatic that is or not, only time will tell. Until then, the statements of the Nvidia marketing stand unchecked in the room. For example, the Optical Flow Accelerator is said to have 2 to 2.5 times the performance of its predecessor. According to Nvidia, the DLSS frame generation is only supported in Lovelace.
| DLSS 3 sub feature | 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 also works 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 offered inclusively, even if older or non-adapted hardware then achieves poorer results.
With DLSS 3, however, Nvidia also includes Reflex in the overall picture and it would be counterproductive if older hardware performed worse, while on the other hand latencies were declared an important point. Maybe Nvidia is still at a disadvantage like it was with G-Sync and is offering DLSS 3 as a “light version” on Ampere and Turing. You will find out from us when the time comes.
Reference-www.pcgameshardware.de