Neural Texture Compression

[ryan]

Nvidia just announced NTC algorithm. apparently it is 10x more efficient and can save alot of bandwidth on photo realistic textures. I wonder how this will impact cards with 6-8gb vram if at all. source below

 

https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/nvidia-introduces-revolutionary-neural-texture-compression-for-material-textures.html#:~:text=NVIDIA has unveiled a cutting,textures employed in photorealistic rendering.

[Etern4l]

This seems to trade off VRAM for compute so ultimately low-end 8GB cards may struggle if they don't have enough GPU capacity to handle this in gaming anyway, especially Turing and Ampere (if the feature is even made available on those architectures). The team used a 4090 for their research, where the technique incurred 2.5-4x higher decompression latency compared to custom HW decompression (depending on the target quality), while using around the same amount of memory as the reference compressed textures (albeit of lower quality)....

[ryan]

found an interesting video that goes more into depth

 

 

[ryan]

People are talking about this now claiming games will need less vram. Kinda thought this was the reason for its existence.not sure how one would argue this

[Etern4l]

Yes, trades off VRAM for compute, so the video card better have lots of the latter to throw around.

[ryan]

Lol bro. Like 99 percent of the gaming world see the pros. It's not like you need a 4090 to use it. I just don't see your angle. Not doubting you just don't see your side of the coin. Needing more power I get. But how much it's just textures which typically uses almost no gpu power and solely vram