NVIDIA and Microsoft could reduce VRAM consumption in games by up to 90%

Early tests of NVIDIA's Neural Texture Compression (NTC) and Microsoft's latest DirectX Raytracing 1.2 have revealed a big drop in VRAM consumption, possibly paving the way for games requiring less VRAM in general.

Neural Texture Compression takes advantage of NVIDIA's neural networks to compress and decompress game textures, which translates to files being reduced in size without them taking a big hit in terms of quality or visual fidelity. NTC has been tested by @opinali, who took to X to share his findings on using the new feature with Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2. The DXR update includes what are called Cooperative Vectors, which enables GPU shaders to work in unison on small matrix or vector operations.

When Cooperative Vectors are paired with NTC it creates an extremely efficient compression/decompression mechanism that operates within DirectX 12. The result is a significant reduction in VRAM consumption. opinali explained in a series of posts that by enabling Cooperative Vectors and NTC the texture renders at 2,350 FPS, while disabling it, the performance drops to 1,030 FPS. More importantly, opinali found "NTC saves almost 90%," and explained that "textures can be 50% - 70% of VRAM used by games, so this is HUGE".

"In a real game considering bandwidth, GPU copy costs, cache efficiency... I bet NTC will be easily a net win in perf/FPS too," explained opinali

Currently VRAM usage in games is a major problem for gamers, as your typical AAA title is now requiring close to 12GB of VRAM to even function. Implementing technology such as NTC would mean gamers wouldn't have to fork out for higher VRAM graphics cards, and GPU-makers wouldn't have to spend on more VRAM modules per unit, meaning graphics cards in general would have a lower cost of production. This would reduce the average cost of a new graphics card, as VRAM modules are one of the most expensive components on the graphics card.