There’s no such thing as too much RAM—ask anyone who’s trying to find a good deal on an Nvidia graphics card. But you might not need to drop a month’s rent on a new GPU to free up some VRAM! Just wait a little while for the newest graphics card driver. The latest version of the DLSS SDK uses significantly less video memory for upscaling graphics.
The latest version of the software development kit indicates that programs taking advantage of Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling tech—so most of the 3D games released in the last few years—will be able to do so with an approximately 20 percent reduction in video RAM usage. That’s according to VideoCardz.com, quoting the reduction at various resolutions from 1080p all the way up to 8K.
In layman’s terms, once these changes are applied to games via updates, you’ll be able to run DLSS optimizations with a lower graphics overhead on GPUs going back to the RTX 30 series, possibly even the 20 series. And with DLSS applied, you can put in more shiny graphics stuff while hitting the same frame rates, or just feel smug as your frames go up without any changes at all. Exactly how long it’ll take game developers to implement the changes will vary from game to game, of course.
Note that a 20 percent reduction in VRAM usage to implement DLSS doesn’t mean 20 percent VRAM freed up for any particular game. We’re talking about a 20 MB savings on a 1080p implementation, and a little over 1 GB at 8K. That’s a chunk of memory saved on the top end… but that’s a situation that only applies to $3,000+ setups. Even so, every little bit helps when it comes to graphics.