Nvidia's Neural Texture Tech May Fix VRAM Shortage Issues
You can't download more RAM, but perhaps you can download a way to use less of it. Nvidia's neural texture compression technology, originally shown off at CES 2025, has been tested with early preview drivers, and the results are impressive. When combined with Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing 1.2 Cooperative Vector technology, they reduced VRAM usage by a staggering 90%. Performance got a big bump, too.
One of the major criticisms levied at Nvidia for its latest RTX 50 generation of graphics cards was that they didn't have enough VRAM. While the top RTX 5090 has 32GB, the second-in-line RTX 5080 has just 16GB, and there are a handful of 8GB cards at the low end that just don't seem fit for purpose anymore. There are plenty of games out now that need more than 8GB to run at anything over minimum settings, and that problem is only going to worsen in the years to come.
Or perhaps not. With neural texture compression, the main driver of increased VRAM needs—detailed textures—goes away.
X (formerly Twitter) user opinali struggled through a few hard resets and screen corruption issues with the early drivers, but when they finally got it working, it was truly impressive. VRAM use was cut by close to 90% in bespoke benchmarks, performance jumped up by almost 80%, and it improved the image quality of the textures, too.
"Textures can be 50%-70% of the VRAM used by games, so this is HUGE", explained Opinali (via WindowsCentral ). "In a real game, considering bandwidth, GPU copy costs, cache efficiency ... I bet NTC will be easily a net win in [performance and FPS] too."
This is all incredibly exciting, especially considering most gamers are still using older or more-modest graphics cards with 8GB (or less!) of VRAM. But it's still very early days. The technology only works (and even then, barely) in a handful of demos, and there are no commercial games that support it just yet. Indeed, it may take a year or more for that to happen, since the technology is so fresh.
But the potential is certainly there for it to have a dramatic impact. If it's easy to implement, we could see much lower system requirements for even demanding games, as well as the possibility of even higher resolution textures, making games look better than ever before.
It won't be limited to Nvidia cards, either. AMD has been working on its own compression efforts:
