In our last installment of the history of the modern graphics processor, we had reached a point where the market consisted of just three competitors: AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. However, in the following years, graphics processors became one of the largest, most complex, and most expensive components that could be found in almost any computing device.
https://www.techspot.com/article/2176-history-of-the-gpu-part-5/
Never heard of that and I couldn't find any source that supports this claim. While it's true that DLSS 1.0 required a per-game model trained on Nvidia's compute grid, this final model was still run on tensor cores. The only game that used DLSS without leveraging tensor cores was Control, which featured the prototype version of what became DLSS 2.0. DLSS 2.0 no longer requires a per-game model, but that has nothing to do with tensor cores - both 1.0 and 2.0 use tensor cores, only "1.9" did not. The model in DLSS 2.0 itself is still generated by Nvidia, not locally on GPU's tensor cores, it's just that the technique no longer requires a separate model for each game.
The information was passed on to me by some game developers (I won't say who or which titles it was, as it would put them into a difficult position). I suppose I should have really said that DLSS 1.0 didn't necessarily use the tensor cores, I.e. it was dependent on the implementation. This is true of any tensor work being done on an RTX GPU. There is no code or flag to activate them: instead, the scheduler will use them to process operations as long as specific conditions are met. If not met, then the standard CUDA cores are issued the instructions.
Ok, that explains most of it. Still, the "Instead, this was all done by Nvidia's own computer grids" part seems wrong - computer grids trained per-game models, but those models were then run locally. This part has nothing to do with players' GPUs, whether early DLSS used tensor cores or not. The only thing that changed with DLSS 2.x is the model is now general, not prepared per game. It's basically a small wording issue, but the "Instead" at the beginning changes the meaning of the whole sentence.
Thanks for catching the Fury X typo. With regards to matter of Direct3D and compute shaders, they formally appeared with DirectX 11 in 2008 - they can be run on D3D10-compliant hardware, though, as Shader Model 5 added profiles backwards into SM4 (albeit in a limited form, as you pointed out).
