Nvidia DLSS gets massive drop in VRAM usage as new Transformer model finally leaves beta
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Following its announcement and release back in January alongside the RTX 50 series graphics cards, DLSS 4’s Transformer model has been released out of beta. The 310.3.0 SDK is now available to all developers alongside bug fixes and stability improvements. However, it also appears to have reduced the VRAM usage of the model closer to the CNN levels, rather than the initial usage of the Transformer model.
An upgrade to image quality and upscaling, the DLSS 4 upgrade updates the libraries for upscaling, ray tracing, and DLSS technology onboard. Additionally, now that it is available, it appears to be applicable across the entire RTX 30 series and beyond. Its usage looks to decrease the VRAM usage by around 20%.
For 1080p, the new update reduces usage from 106.9 to 85.77MB (-19.8%), and for 1440p, it decreases from 181.11 to 143.52MB (-20.7%). At 4K, the VRAM usage goes from 387.21 to 307.37MB (-20.6%). We think the biggest winners here are Nvidia’s budget cards with lower amounts of VRAM, like the RTX 5060, which might gain some extra performance when upscaling while being less bottlenecked by the 8GB of memory.
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Wider adoption and performance
Now that it has been released into the wild, it may also be used more frequently. We already know that DLSS 4 has had faster adoption than DLSS 3, and it may see even wider adoption, considering it’s now available to any developer for use. It might also provide better implementation of the DLSS 4 override Nvidia had in its app previously.
As we tested in our RTX 5080 FE review, the Transformer model does an excellent job of improving game performance where possible while maintaining higher quality, thanks to its ability to preserve what it needs and the option to add more frames versus the original.
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