This was made possible by moving from a hardware-based Optical Flow accelerator to a solution that is entirely based on artificial intelligence. Previously, NVIDIA technologies were not transferable between generations due to their heavy dependence on hardware capacity.
"When we built NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation, we absolutely needed hardware acceleration to compute Optical Flow. We didn't have enough Tensor Cores and we didn't have an Optical Flow algorithm that was good enough. We hadn't developed a real-time Optical Flow algorithm that ran on Tensor Cores that could fit our compute budget," Catanzaro says.
The new AI-powered frame generation model uses less VRAM, offers improved image quality, and is more efficient.
When asked whether it was possible to port the new technology to older generations, Catanzaro said that it could indeed happen.
"I think it is primarily a matter of optimization and design, followed by the best user experience. We are launching this frame generation, the best Multi-Frame Generation technology with the 50xx series, and we will be able to see what we can ‘squeeze’ out of older hardware in the future," said the vice president of NVIDIA.