NVIDIA has impressed the world with the official presentation of the graphics GeForce RTX 4080 and RTX 4090however, it seems that it has not been clear to some how the support of DLSS 3, the third generation of AI-powered supersampling technology, will work, due to the fact that it is only supported by Ada Lovelace.
What if you run a game that has implemented DLSS 3 but you have a GeForce RTX 20 (Turing) or RTX 30 (Ampere) graphics? The green giant has come forward to explain that users have nothing to worry about or at least have no reason to pull their hair out, since video games with DLSS 3 support should also be compatible with DLSS 2which on an Ampere graph would be possible to activate together with Reflex.
The OFA has existed in GPUs since Turing. However it is significantly faster and higher quality in Ada and we rely on it for DLSS3.
— Bryan Catanzaro (@ctnzr) September 20, 2022
The origin of the lack of DLSS 3 compatibility with generations prior to Ada Lovelace comes from the fact that GeForce RTX 40 graphics include a hardware feature called Optical Flow Accelerator. NVIDIA has explained that the Optical Flow Accelerator feeds the DLSS 3 Frame Generation neural network with pixel movement data from subsequent frames, thus generating new frames on the GPU to ensure performance even in processor-dependent games.
Because then customers would feel that DLSS3 is laggy, has poor image quality and doesn’t boost FPS.
— Bryan Catanzaro (@ctnzr) September 20, 2022
While it’s true that the Ampere generation includes the Optical Flow Accelerator, Bryan Catanzaro, NVIDIA’s vice president of applied deep learning research, has stepped out to say via Twitter that the technology has received significant improvements in Ada Lovelace and that , even though it would be possible to run DLSS 3 on top of Ampere, the performance would not be optimal.
In short, users do not have to worry about those developers announcing games compatible with DLSS 3, since those titles should also support DLSS 2, version of the technology compatible with RTX 20 and RTX 30.

