Nvidia's new VRAM trick sounds great, until you realize your RTX card can't even use it
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Nvidia's Neural Texture Compression (NTC) is an AI-powered technique that uses neural networks to reconstruct textures in real time, potentially reducing VRAM usage by up to 85% compared to traditional Block Compression. Demonstrated at GTC 2026 on an RTX 5090, NTC dropped a scene's VRAM usage from ~6.5GB to under 1GB without visual quality loss. The catch: effective NTC requires the Tensor cores found only in RTX 40 and RTX 50 series GPUs, leaving RTX 20 and 30 series owners without meaningful benefit. Critics also note NTC gives Nvidia another justification to keep shipping 8GB VRAM cards while deprioritizing raw hardware improvements, and adoption depends entirely on game developers choosing to implement it.
