Frame generation also for RTX 3000 cards?

Everything is currently centered around the new Blackwell graphics cards from Nvidia. In an interview, however, the company let it be known that there is a chance that frame generation will also be available with the models of the RTX 3000 series in the future.

New technology soon on old cards?

Immediately after the presentation of the new RTX 5000 series, many customers received the disappointing news that Nvidia was practically completely ceasing production of its previous generation of graphics cards. But now Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia’s VP of Applied Deep Learning Research in one interview let it be known that you don’t want to put older GeForce cards on the sidelines.

In the future, even models in the 3000 series could benefit from new technologies. What Catanzaro was alluding to is frame generation – a technology previously reserved for RTX 4000 cards. With their help, additional images are generated. In this way, significantly more frames per second can be displayed, which leads to a smoother display.

Changed conditions

With the DLSS3 frame generation, Nvidia used so-called optical flow hardware accelerators, of which the RTX 4000 series GPUs have a significantly better version compared to the RTX 3000 GPUs. Therefore, cards from the 3000 series have so far been left out of Frame Generation. But with the appearance of the Blackwell generation, that could change.

Because the technology for creating additional images is being completely transformed and will be completely AI-based in the future. Instead of the optical flow hardware accelerators, the tensor cores of the GPUs are used. In addition, significantly less VRAM is required. These two changes make a debut of frame generation on RTX 3000 series cards conceivable. The Tensor cores of the 3000 series could be a particular problem. Because they are also significantly weaker than those of the 4000 and 5000 cards.

I think it’s primarily a question of optimization and also technology and ultimately the resulting user experience. We’re introducing this frame generation, the best multi-frame generation technology, with the 50 series, and we’ll see what we can get out of older hardware in the future. Bryan Catanzaro, Nvidia

No guarantee

The chances that frame generation will finally find its way onto Nvidia’s older graphics cards have increased significantly. Still, there’s no guarantee that engineers will be able to squeeze enough out of the 3000 cards’ Tensor cores to integrate the technology in a satisfactory form.

However, owners of a GeForce RTX 3090 and upwards can have hope. They probably don’t have much more left. Because if you want to upgrade to a new Blackwell card, you will probably have difficulties. Nvidia has already limited sales.