Future generations of graphics cards might not need 50TB of memory after all.
Some of 2023’s most anticipated PC games have had their fair share of troubles. Hogwarts Legacy (opens in new tab) and The Last of Us Part 1 (opens in new tab) are just two that ran horribly on cards with insufficient VRAM. It seems like a problem that’s here to stay. Even if you have enough graphics memory right now, will it be enough to handle the demands of games in one, two, or three years from now?
There is some good news on the horizon thanks to Nvidia. It’s working on a new compression technology it calls Neural Texture Compression, and like most of the tech coming out of Nvidia these days, it’s thanks to AI.
According to Nvidia (opens in new tab) (via Hot Hardware (opens in new tab)), the new method allows material textures to store up to 16x more data in the same space than traditional block-based compression methods.
