Nvidia RTX 50 Series Graphics Cards They will arrive in a matter of days, and although they could be among the best graphics cards you can buy, Nvidia itself could have given PC gamers a reason not to participate in this generation.
The news comes via an interview Catanzaro did with Digital Foundry, where the question arose about frame generation on RTX 30-series GPUs. Catanzaro says that allowing frame generation on previous generations “is primarily a matter of optimization” and states that Nvidia will “see what we can get out of older hardware in the future.”
Over the last two generations, Nvidia has put a much greater emphasis on DLSS when marketing their graphics cards. This also applies to their latest RTX 50 series GPUs, which promise up to 4X frame generation with DLSS 4.
It should be possible, although with a loss of quality or performance. Tools like lossless scaling have provided insight into multi-frame generation, and while the experience isn’t perfect, it’s still usable. Nvidia’s older 40 and 30 series RTX GPUs may not have the latest Tensor cores available in the RTX 50 series GPUs, but they still have some AI hardware and should theoretically be able to perform the frame generation.
The question for Nvidia, it seems, is not whether frame-shifting is possible in previous generations; is whether the frame generation is practical. There would probably be a loss in quality if Nvidia backed its frame generation technology, but the biggest concern is performance. Enabling these features on older graphics cards may cause several issues.
First, there are overheads. Faster Tensor cores mean that RTX 50-series GPUs don’t need to spend much time on the frame generation algorithm, and with weaker AI hardware, older generations may spend too much time processing the algorithm. This could lead to little or no performance gain. There’s also the issue of frame pacing to contend with, which is something Nvidia needs to keep in careful balance with the RTX 40 and 50 series GPUs.
Although it is an open question whether Nvidia will bring frame generation to previous generations, all RTX graphics cards will benefit from DLSS 4. The company has moved from a convolutional neural
