NVIDIA's DLSS Transformer Tech Slashes VRAM Usage By 20%

If you keep up with PC gaming news, you're almost assuredly aware that when NVIDIA unveiled the Blackwell-based GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, it also released "DLSS 4", with Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) and a new Transformer-based model for Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction. The part you may not have heard is that, aside from MFG, "DLSS 4" is actually available for all GeForce RTX GPUs, meaning that you can enjoy the visual benefits of the latest DLSS upscaling model even if you're rocking a GeForce RTX 20 Series (Turing) GPU.

The downside is that the Transformer-based DLSS models are considerably heavier than the previous-generation CNN-based models, and as a result, the performance gains you get from enabling DLSS upscaling are markedly smaller than before. This effect is minimal on Blackwell, small on Ada Lovelace, noticeable on Ampere, and quite large on Turing. What you might not expect, though ...