Nvidia’s latest GPU driver introduces its new AI-based upscaling technique for making lower-resolution videos streamed offline look better on a high-resolution display. Now available via the GeForce driver 531.18 released on Tuesday, Nvidia’s RTX Video Super Resolution (VSR) successfully cleaned up some of the edges and blockiness of a 480p and 1080p video I watched on Chrome using a 3080 Ti laptop GPU-powered system, but there are caveats.
By Nvidia’s measures, 90 percent of video streamed off the Internet, be it from Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Twitch, or elsewhere, is 1080p resolution or lower. For many users, especially those with Nvidia GPU-equipped systems, when moving to 1440p and 4K screens, browsers upscale this content, which can result in image artifacts like soft edges.
Nvidia VSR, which (somehow) shouldn’t be confused with AMD VSR (Virtual Super Resolution, targeting lower-resolution displays), uses the AI and RTX Tensor cores in Nvidia’s 30- and 40-series desktop and mobile GPUs to boost sharpness and eliminate “blocky compression artifacts” when upscaling content to 4K resolution, per a blog post Tuesday by Brian Choi, Nvidia’s Shield TV product manager.
In addition to blockiness, Nvidia’s Choi said that VSR targets “ringing artifacts around edges, washout of high-frequency details, and banding on flat areas—while reducing lost textures.”
The feature currently only works with the latest versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, as it has been incorporated into Chromium. Nvidia said it hasn’t tested the feature with other browsers leveraging Chromium.
Further, support for other GPUs, including the 20-series, isn’t available yet, despite what Tom’s Hardware testing described as a “relatively small” computational workload that the older cards could likely handle. In a support page, Nvidia said VSR support for its 20-series GPUs would come sometime after it refactors “many” of the feature’s algorithms.
