Nvidia Neural Texture Compression delivers 90% VRAM savings with DXR 1.2

Nvidia Neural Texture Compression could make VRAM issues a thing of the past

Over on Twitter/X, @opinali has tested the impact of Nvidia’s Neural Texture Compression technology (demo here) when used alongside DirectX Raytracing 1.2’s (DXR 1.2) Cooperative Vectors feature.

Cooperative Vectors will enable developers to integrate AI workloads into the real-time rendering pipeline. It allows developers to make use of hardware-accelerated vector and matrix operations, allowing creative uses of AI in standard gaming workloads.

(Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein on Twitter/X)

Using Neural Texture Compression (NTC), textures can be reduced in size by almost 90%. This significantly reduces the memory usage of games, enabling more complex visuals to be rendered on hardware with less VRAM.

DXR 1.2’s Cooperative Vectors feature will enable the AI hardware of various GPU architectures to be used to achieve these results. This means that Neural Texture Compression will not be an Nvidia-only feature, which is great news for all PC gamers.

Textures make up 50-70% of VRAM usage in games

@opinali says that textures can account for 50-70% of the VRAM utilisation of games. This means that AI hardware could be used to make high-end gaming more viable on graphics cards with little VRAM. That said, this won’t lower the VRAM use of existing games, and many modern games are struggling to run well on graphics cards with 8GB of memory.

Overall, Neural Texture Compression is a fascinating technology. It has the potential to change gaming forever. If nothing else, it will allow developers to do more with less. Additionally, this tech could be used to reduce the download size of games, saving precious SSD space. Note that this tech will be available on future PCs and consoles. That means it’s only a matter of time before this tech is adopted.

You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s NTC tech delivering 90% VRAM savings with DXR 1.2 on the OC3D Forums.