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Is Nvidia going to make DLSS mandatory?

nkarafo

Member
With the 3xxx series having such small memory amounts, it's almost certain DLSS is going to be the only way to play games later in this gen at high settings.

I thought DLSS benefits users but if you think about it, in the long run, it's almost as if it was created so NVIDIA can justify selling cards with less VRAM than AMD an no reduced prices.
 
With the 3xxx series having such small memory amounts, it's almost certain DLSS is going to be the only way to play games later in this gen at high settings.

I thought DLSS benefits users but if you think about it, in the long run, it's almost as if it was created so NVIDIA can justify selling cards with less VRAM than AMD an no reduced prices.

If you run into vram issues just turn down textures and go on your way.
 
DLSS should be something every developer should implement simply because it widens the potential audience for their game.

if even the lowest RTX card can make your game look great while running well that is a huge selling point for your game.
 
Mandatory as in stop games from working on their cards if the game doesn't have it?
No, as in there is not enough VRAM to run the game without DLSS

DLSS should be something every developer should implement simply because it widens the potential audience for their game.

if even the lowest RTX card can make your game look great while running well that is a huge selling point for your game.
I know but i feel like Nvidia is taking advantage of this, they allow them to sell cards with lower VRAM.
 
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DLSS is a stop-gap measure in-between previous & next-gen, it allows Nvidia to flex their software muscles by being "early" and also gives them a killer marketing gimmick, which is something they've always excelled at. You're right that if you look at Ampere the vram situation is very anemic but also I was thinking about it earlier and they're caught in sort of a shit situation overall.

If you have a 3090 and you want 4K 60 + RT, that's not possible. Hell, it's not even possible with DLSS on for the most part. But if you disable RT then a lot of hardware gets unused & with how wide the 3090 is you can't really utilise it well EXCEPT at 4K (or above) and with ray tracing. So if you want to do something like 1440p 120fps then you're barely getting that but also a lot of the hardware you're paying good money for goes underutilised. So it's either a) you push ray tracing & 4K hard in order to get the most out of the hardware but you don't hit that magical 4K 60 + RT threshold; or b) you turn things down but you end up vastly overpaying for the experience.

I guess this is the price to pay for Nvidia selling only 1 arch and giving gamers whatever's left from their high-margin markets. Again - ironic, because AMD used to be that company and Nvidia was doing the dual-pronged approach, but now AMD's doing that.
 
nah don't be silly.

DLSS is optional for developers. they'd have a hard time enforcing it. if Nvidia tried then it'd only benefit AMD.

DLSS is a great feature but it was largely introduced to mitigate the performance impact of RTX.
 
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With the 3xxx series having such small memory amounts, it's almost certain DLSS is going to be the only way to play games later in this gen at high settings.
Next year, there is going to be 4xxx series and the year after 5xxx series...

So.. I doubt the "low memory" of 3xxx will matter "later in this gen".

Edit: I just assumed you meant console generations with "this gen", but it just occurred to me that you might be referring to the graphics card, if so "later this gen" might just mean 6 months from now.. :messenger_expressionless:
 
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Oh so you can't just use DLSS in every game if you have a Nvidia card?
lol no. developers need to add DLSS support.

the only games i have that i can use DLSS in are Fortnite + Death Stranding.

the other games i have installed have no DLSS support: Flight Simulator, Rocket League, No Man's Sky, World of Warcraft, THPS1+2, Destiny 2

you can run ANY game at low resolution and the GPU will upscale/sharpen it but it's no where near as good as DLSS.
 
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Next year, there is going to be 4xxx series and the year after 5xxx series...

So.. I doubt the "low memory" of 3xxx will matter "later in this gen".
Pretty sure a 3070 or 3080 are powerful enough to last the whole gen... if it wasn't for the low VRAM amount. They also cost high enough to expect such a thing.
 
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Pretty sure a 3070 or 3080 are powerful enough to last the whole gen... if it wasn't for the low VRAM amount. They also cost high enough to expect such a thing.

And they'll last the entire gen...as long as you're fine with turning down a few sliders, how is this an issue?
 
Every developer should do that for their PC port, DLSS 2.0 is bar none the best technology of this day and age for gaming. Still waiting for that magic, which MS hinted, but I am at the point of loosing hope.
 
Low memory? Don't these cards ship with 10-24gb of video memory? I only have 32gb system ram in my PC and only 16 in my laptop.
 
Memory isn't going to stop you before simply not having power will.

People think 8GB will be a bottleneck.....but that GPU simply won't have the power to render whatever it is you wanted to render that actually needed more than 8GB of VRAM.

We've seen games at beyond 4K not eat the VRAM but already be out of juice to actually push playable frames.
 
With the 3xxx series having such small memory amounts, it's almost certain DLSS is going to be the only way to play games later in this gen at high settings.

I thought DLSS benefits users but if you think about it, in the long run, it's almost as if it was created so NVIDIA can justify selling cards with less VRAM than AMD an no reduced prices.
my 3090 has only gotten close to maxed out VRAM playing the new CoD with its high res texture pack installed. Was at about 20/24gb i believe.
 
At this stage it requires work from the developers so therefore it will be optional.

If they want to ensure it works with every game then they need to find a way of implementing it at the driver level.
 
With things like direct storage coming, wouldn't VRAM usage be lower in actuality? Especially with a much higher bandwidth than consoles or 6xxx series cards, which is why they perform even better at 4K. Nvidia isn't dumb, and I doubt GAF knows more than them. Allocation =/= usage
 
my 3090 has only gotten close to maxed out VRAM playing the new CoD with its high res texture pack installed. Was at about 20/24gb i believe.

Not even close.
People mistake cached memory with actual memory usage.
Games will usually say they are using or need xxGB but in actuality are using half or even less than half of that.
You could literally make a screensaver that actually uses 100mb of VRAM but requests 10GB and the old afterburner and even task manager will tell you that you are using 10GBs of VRAM.

Afterburner can now tell you the truth about what your process is using and when you see that figure you'll be spitting at devs who lied to us and told us we need 12GB of VRAM.
 
my 3090 has only gotten close to maxed out VRAM playing the new CoD with its high res texture pack installed. Was at about 20/24gb i believe.

Not even close.
People mistake cached memory with actual memory usage.
Games will usually say they are using or need xxGB but in actuality are using half or even less than half of that.
You could literally make a screensaver that actually uses 100mb of VRAM but requests 10GB and the old afterburner and even task manager will tell you that you are using 10GBs of VRAM.

Afterburner can now tell you the truth about what your process is using and when you see that figure you'll be spitting at devs who lied to us and told us we need 12GB of VRAM.
 
Not even close.
People mistake cached memory with actual memory usage.
Games will usually say they are using or need xxGB but in actuality are using half or even less than half of that.
You could literally make a screensaver that actually uses 100mb of VRAM but requests 10GB and the old afterburner and even task manager will tell you that you are using 10GBs of VRAM.

Afterburner can now tell you the truth about what your process is using and when you see that figure you'll be spitting at devs who lied to us and told us we need 12GB of VRAM.
I'll double check with afterburner but thats the only time ive seen a game do anything like that.
 
With the 3xxx series having such small memory amounts, it's almost certain DLSS is going to be the only way to play games later in this gen at high settings.

I thought DLSS benefits users but if you think about it, in the long run, it's almost as if it was created so NVIDIA can justify selling cards with less VRAM than AMD an no reduced prices.

Working set at 4K is typically 256MB, at 1080p - 64MB.
I don't think these 192MB will save anyone.
 
I think high resolutions are going to make DLSS or similar technology effectively mandatory. Rendering at 4K or especially 8K natively is chasing marginal gains, if you can achieve similar image quality with less work, you will.

It's kind of like would you use lossy compression on images and most times answer is yes.
 
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I'll double check with afterburner but thats the only time ive seen a game do anything like that.

Yeah do that make sure you've got the latest version and have both VRAM measurements active you'll see the difference between what's being reported to windows and what's really going on with your VRAM
 
How exactly can it measure that?

It sees what the process is actively using not what it's requesting.

Because a process can request pretty much any arbitrary number and "reserve" it, then report to windows that this is what it is using.
Afterburner can now see what the process is actually using not the number it effectively made up.
 
It sees what the process is actively using not what it's requesting.

Because a process can request pretty much any arbitrary number and "reserve" it, then report to windows that this is what it is using.
Afterburner can now see what the process is actually using not the number it effectively made up.

How? If it's using half this frame and half second frame. What exactly will be shown?
If it conservatively streams-in data to be there because i/o is much slower than vram what will be shown?
 
The 30xx series is more powerful now, and will be in the future. DLSS enable them to achieve great performance with RT, there are other ways to mitigate the vram difference.

Those consoles can't do 4k native now, and they won't in the future.
 
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How? If it's using half this frame and half second frame. What exactly will be shown?
If it conservatively streams-in data to be there because i/o is much slower than vram what will be shown?

What?
The amount of memory that is being physically used is "easy" to measure.

Think of it like those weird viruses that tells you your hdd is full even if physically it's not. That's effectively what games are doing they are claiming to be using xxGB but are using actually using much less.

Afterburner can read the actual amount of VRAM a process is using in realtime and that number is almost always lower than what's reported to windows.
 
How do they "mandate DLSS" and who do they mandate? Developers or customers/players?

That's one way of gifting AMD a significant amount of GPU marketshare, especially now when RDNA2 has caught up and even exceeded them in rasterized performance, and despite AMD being half of what Ampere could do at RT and DLSS.

Customers will actually hate DLSS and RT if Nvidia tried anything funny like that.

Forcing "Nvidia partnered" developers (for example CDPR in Cyberpunk 2077, Remedy in Control etc,) is one thing and they actually need to do that because they've invested money into those developers to use their proprietary black box tech, but putting up artificial barriers and generalizing it will backfire badly and hurt them where the competing vendor is just waiting for an opening to go for the kill. Just like Intel.

Don't fix shit that ain't broken.
 
it will discourage sales of their higher end cards.

if you can get 3080 performance by using 3060 and some additional reconstruction (with maybe minor hit to iq), why would you get cards costing twice, thrice?
 
it will discourage sales of their higher end cards.

if you can get 3080 performance by using 3060 and some additional reconstruction (with maybe minor hit to iq), why would you get cards costing twice, thrice?
Because you will still get those gains on top of higher end cards too? Also they don't care as long as you buy team green
 
Nah, its a cool tech, but I prefer native res personally. I'd rather drop fps to 30 than compromise even 10% of 4K's pixel count.

I spent like an hour fucking around with Trine 4 trying to get it to work at locked 60 on my GTX 1080, I had to keep dropping the resolution scaler more and more until I was at 80% and at that point I was like, why not just lock to 30 and set it to native 4K and forget about it? Well I should've done that at the start because now I just marvel at the backgrounds instead of being annoyed by blur and slowdown. The loss of fluidity is barely noticeable because the camera is static most of the time so well worth the tradeoff.

If the first statement offends you please send your angry letters and threats here: https://www.fakeaddressgenerator.com/
 
Memory isn't going to stop you before simply not having power will.

People think 8GB will be a bottleneck.....but that GPU simply won't have the power to render whatever it is you wanted to render that actually needed more than 8GB of VRAM.

We've seen games at beyond 4K not eat the VRAM but already be out of juice to actually push playable frames.

Exactly, an example being RE3 remake, if you set texture quality to maximum and play at native 4K it says it will need like ~8000MB of VRAM but it never went above ~5500MB according to Afterburner, so it seems like there is a lot of headroom even on an 8GB card at native 4K. Even at 8K it sayts something crazy like ~12000MB but it never went above ~7000. Although I'm sure thats close enough to 8GB that it might cause stutters when its swapping tons at once.
 
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Because you will still get those gains on top of higher end cards too? Also they don't care as long as you buy team green

This is increasing longevity of their cards.

Their business model is to pretty much force gamers to upgrade every 3-4 years.

With dlss gamers will easily outlast a console generation.

What exactly will be benefit to Nvidia for offering extensive dlss support? Extra customers brought in from team red will be offset by people who would stick to old cards for another year or two, resulting in industry wide sales contraction.
 
DLSS and similar technologies are the future. We already have games running at sub-4K looking better than native 4K with DLSS on. It's miracle tech as far as I'm concerned.

I really hope they get it into whatever Nintendo's Switch successor is.
 
Exactly, an example being RE3 remake, if you set texture quality to maximum and play at native 4K it says it will need like ~8000MB of VRAM but it never went above ~5500MB according to Afterburner, so it seems like there is a lot of headroom even on an 8GB card at native 4K. Even at 8K it sayts something crazy like ~12000MB but it never went above ~7000. Although I'm sure thats close enough to 8GB that it might cause stutters when its swapping tons at once.
Shhhh, you can't speak facts in FUD threads like this. The console warriors eat this shit up and spread it in all of the forums. Can you edit your post and remove all those straight up facts? GAF and rational thought shouldn't go together.
 
DLSS and similar technologies are the future. We already have games running at sub-4K looking better than native 4K with DLSS on. It's miracle tech as far as I'm concerned.

I really hope they get it into whatever Nintendo's Switch successor is.

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Sorry man, nothing personal but this isn't possible. The DLSS council have gotten to you, haven't they?
 
This is increasing longevity of their cards.

Their business model is to pretty much force gamers to upgrade every 3-4 years.

With dlss gamers will easily outlast a console generation.

What exactly will be benefit to Nvidia for offering extensive dlss support? Extra customers brought in from team red will be offset by people who would stick to old cards for another year or two, resulting in industry wide sales contraction.
The people that buy 3090s and the like are very few and far between, they'll upgrade no matter what because they always want the best, there's always something you can do better, higher FPS especially now with crazy high refresh rate monitors
 
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Sorry man, nothing personal but this isn't possible. The DLSS council have gotten to you, haven't they?




etc.

You may not agree, but I think it looks better and, more importantly, it gets you to 60+ FPS at "4K" resolution, which instantly beats anything sub-60 FPS at native resolution, so I will gladly take it every single time.
 
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I spent like an hour fucking around with Trine 4 trying to get it to work at locked 60 on my GTX 1080, I had to keep dropping the resolution scaler more and more until I was at 80% and at that point I was like, why not just lock to 30 and set it to native 4K and forget about it? Well I should've done that at the start because now I just marvel at the backgrounds instead of being annoyed by blur and slowdown. The loss of fluidity is barely noticeable because the camera is static most of the time so well worth the tradeoff.
I don't see how simple upscaling which might be badly implemented to boot is remotely comparable to DLSS. That said, I don't mind playing at 30 fps in certain games.
 
The thing is DLSS is not needed for everything. At some point, if your game in rasterization performances is hitting easy >144 fps, DLSS would just become some kind of overkill where less than 1% of gamers even have the monitors for such a refresh rate. Sure, it would be nice to always have, but let's be realistic. The games that need the most are with RT effects, because then it literally makes the difference between unsufferable framerates to "hey, this is playable"

DirectStorage's inclusion in D12u API and game engines that will start to change their data management systems ala unreal 5 will make VRAM discussions a thing of the past. Because now VRAM is no longer filled with 95% idling data, for the next 30 seconds or more of gameplay. It'll act like a buffer, 1~3 seconds of data needed for what the player directly sees (and even that will have variable rate shaders, or like unreal 5's nanite with on the fly LOD to reduce data density), barely idling data in VRAM, while SSD is seen as almost an extension to video memory.

I would say that SRAM choking at 4K, even if you have 16GB of VRAM, is more troublesome for the future proofing of these huge data streams.

There's also xbox developers going with ML solutions for AI texture upscaling that would again reduce size of textures.

There's always going to be developers who fuck up their port, like always, but in general, the age of brute forcing your way to rendering, wether it's resolution or data management, should be over soon.
 
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