NVIDIA recently introduced its new DLSS 3 technology that adds a new feature known as Frame Generation on supported GPUs. The company officially said that this feature was only available on their new GeForce RTX 40 series cards but it looks like a Redditor has bypassed the lock & enabled it on an RTX 20 series graphics card.
DLSS 3 Lock Bypassed? Redditor Enables Frame Generation on GeForce RTX 2070 With A Simple Config File
The Redditor who goes by the username, JusDax, posted in the NVIDIA subreddit under a thread talking about new settings and features being added to Cyberpunk 2077. One of the upcoming features within Cyberpunk 2077 will be DLSS 3 which enables AI-Assisted frame generation that does wonders in boosting the frame rate. We have more details and comparisons over here.
The user says that he was able to bypass the DLSS 3 lock on older GeForce RTX cards by adding a config file to remove the VRAM overhead in Cyberpunk. He ran the game at 1440p with HDR off & DLSS set to balanced mode. He was also able to select the Frame Generation tab under the Ultra ray tracing preset.
DLSS Frame Generation doesn't seem to be hardware locked to RTX 40 series. I was able to bypass a software lock by adding a config file to remove the VRAM overhead in Cyberpunk. Doing this causes some instability and frame drops but I'm getting ~80 FPS on an RTX 2070 with the following settings:
2560x1440 res
HDR off
DLSS Balanced
DLSS Frame Generation ON
Ray Tracing Ultra preset
(I get ~35-40 FPS without Frame Generation and DLSS at Quality)
Edit: forgot to add some details
Without frame generation, his NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 gets around 35-40 FPS but with DLSS 3 frame generation enabled, the user got 80 FPS. That's almost twice or a bigger performance jump. The user did use a different DLSS preset (Balanced) to test frame generation but still, switching from quality to balanced preset even in DLSS 2 won't net you a 2x gain.
While there's definitely a performance gain on older cards with DLSS 3 frame generation enabled, it should be pointed out that it wasn't without its fair share of issues. The user experienced instability and frame drops so running frame generation on DLSS 3 won't get you the most optimized gaming experience at the moment since it is designed with GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards in mind.
JusDax also hasn't really shared any images or the config file so we can't really test it or confirm this ourselves. What we did see in our own testing was that the frame generation switch can be toggled on and off on an RTX 30 and RTX 20 graphics card but we didn't see any difference in FPS or other performance metrics.
This is a fairly new development in a technology that was just recently introduced and we can't say for sure at the moment whether the lock for DLSS 3 was in place due to the lack of hardware capabilities or the lack of software optimizations for older GPUs when running the new feature. We will try to dig up more information as it comes.
News Source: Chariman Jeb!
