Nvidia’s New AI Upscaling Technology Makes Low-Res Videos Clearer in Chrome, Edge

Nvidia’s latest GPU driver introduces a new AI-based scaling technology that allows lower-resolution video streamed offline to look better on a high-resolution display. Now available via the GeForce 531.18 driver released on Tuesday, Nvidia RTX Video Super Resolution (VSR) successfully cleaned up some of the edges and blockiness of 480p and 1080p video I watched in Chrome using a 3080 Ti laptop GPU-based system, but there are caveats.

By Nvidia’s standards, 90% of streaming video from the internet, be it Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Twitch or anywhere else, is 1080p or lower. For many users, especially those with Nvidia GPU systems, when going to 1440p and 4K screens, browsers upscale this content, which can lead to image artifacts such as blurry edges.

Nvidia VSR, which (somehow) should not be confused with AMD VSR (Virtual Super Resolution aimed at lower resolution displays), uses AI and RTX Tensor cores in Nvidia 30th and 40th desktop and mobile GPUs series to sharpen and eliminate “blocky compression artifacts”when upscaling content to 4K resolution, according to a blog post on Tuesday by Brian Choi, product manager for Nvidia Shield TV.

In addition to blockiness, Nvidia’s Choi said that VSR is aimed at “ringing artifacts around the edges, blurring of high-frequency detail and banding in flat areas – while reducing texture loss.”

This feature currently only works with the latest versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge as it was included with Chromium. Nvidia has stated that it has not tested this feature with other browsers using Chromium.

In addition, support for other GPUs, including the 20-series, is not yet available, despite what Tom’s Hardware’s hardware testing described as a “relatively light”compute load that older cards could probably handle. On the support page, Nvidia has said that VSR support for its 20-series GPUs will come sometime after refactoring “many”of the feature’s algorithms.

Clearer picture

I’ve tried watching lower resolutions on a 4K monitor with VSR (you can bet the fans in my system have started revving loudly) and noticed improvements when watching very slow video. Sharp eyes might be able to keep up with the big one, but extensive testing by Tom’s Hardware also found that while Nvidia’s upscaling technique works “pretty well,”it works best with videos with slower content like those Nvidia used. for demonstrations. Of course, this experience doesn’t compare to watching native 4K content on a 4K screen.

Nvidia VSR has four levels, and when I used it at the maximum level for 1080p video, some details looked sharper. For example, one YouTube video had more defined clouds hovering over the top of a mountain, and parts of a large body of water appeared less blocky.

When watching a 1080p show on Netflix in Chrome browser, you could notice a slight improvement in image clarity – again if I watched very closely and especially if there wasn’t a lot of movement.

But don’t expect this feature to make 480p content look like crisp 4K. This feature has slightly reduced some of the blockiness in a YouTube video of a baseball player slowly swinging his bat, but to the naked eye this is not a huge improvement.

Of course, your experience will vary depending on factors such as your system and display specifications (there are more powerful supported GPUs than the one I used) and the video in question.

For a deeper dive, Tom’s Hardware has an interesting gallery of lossless images. The publication pointed to a noticeable difference between upscaling and Chrome. Sports videos, for example, have not seen “a significant improvement, but there is definitely some sharpening and block removal that, at least in our subjective opinion, looks better,”the post reads.

Performance also depends on how big of a jump you make. For example, upscaling from 1080p to 4K is less tiring than downscaling from lower resolutions. When it came to upscaling a 480p video of a football game, Tom’s Hardware said it had lost “a ton of detail”, such as the football net stands.

For laptop users, using a VSR may result in reduced battery life even when the VSR is not used. This is because the GPU automatically starts consuming power when the browser is launched. As such, Nvidia recommends using an additional browser to view VSR videos.

Naturally, VSR also consumes some GPU resources (besides the fact that it affects the battery life of laptop users). Nvidia acknowledges “a slight performance hit when running parallel games or using GPU-intensive creative applications.”