Nvidia has tweaked the latest version of DLSS so that it eats less of your graphics card memory than before, potentially giving your Nvidia GeForce graphics card a little more room to breathe. The change comes with the release of the new Nvidia 310.3.0 Software Development Kit (SDK), which the company says reduces the VRAM demands of DLSS when using upscaling and ray tracing.
Even at lower resolutions, games with high-resolution textures and ray tracing can push VRAM usage beyond the capacities of many otherwise great GPUs, as we found in our Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 review, with some games really pushing the limits of 8GB of memory. This is where the new Nvidia 310.3.0 SDK can lend a helping hand, reducing the VRAM usage of the new DLSS transformer model by 20%. This potentially frees up additional VRAM to give the GPU a little more headroom before performance falls off a cliff.
In our tests, as demonstrated in our RTX 5090 review, we’ve found that the new transformer model of Nvidia DLSS Super Resolution has a massive impact on image quality and stability compared to the old CNN model. Game graphics look much sharper and less blurry, and there’s much less noise and ghosting around moving objects too.
However, enabling the transformer model also results in a slight performance hit compared to the CNN model, and it also uses more VRAM, with Nvidia’s “ballpark” figures in the SDK documentation (as spotted by Videocardz) showing that a game running at 4K would need 387.21MB of VRAM for the DLSS transformer, compared to just 199.65MB for the older CNN model.
There’s still a VRAM penalty to pay for the transformer model with the new SDK, but Nvidia says that footprint has now been reduced to 307.37MB, a drop of over 20% compared to using the older 310.2.0 SDK, and the drops at other resolutions are all in the same 20% area.
That’s still a fair amount of memory to allocate just to upscaling, of course, especially when you free up over 100MB by using the CNN model at 4K instead, but it’s good to see the figures coming down. Hopefully, Nvidia is indeed planning a refresh of its Blackwell GPUs with more VRAM, as seen in the latest rumors about the RTX 5070 Super, as well as the RTX 5080 Super.
If you’re thinking of upgrading your GPU, check out our guide to buying the best graphics card, where we run you through all our favorite options to suit a range of budgets.
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