there's one big compromise that gamers have had to make for a long time do you
want your games to look better or do you want them to run faster typically this
is meant turning down your graphics setting to get more frames per second
especially if you don't have a high end graphics card but today we're instead
going to talk about the amount of input lag that gets introduced when you're
trying to upscale a game we consulted with our friend amine Shaban over at
Mercy to put this video together so we like to thank him for his help now to be
clear I am NOT talking about your GPU rendering frames from scratch what I'm
referring to instead is what happens after your GPU finishes rendering a
frame and either the GPU or your display
resizes the image to make it fit a certain resolution you can see this if
you're running a PC game at below your monitors native resolution to improve
performance or if you hooked up an older console to modern flat panel TV now
there are different forms of upscaling some of which look nicer than others but
they all require a certain amount of post-processing time which can introduce
noticeable input lag meaning that there's a delay between when you press a
button or move a thump stick or move the mouse and the corresponding action
appearing on the screen and this can seriously hinder gameplay for obvious
reasons especially in older titles like classic platforms where a responsiveness
is a huge part of making the game feel like you remember but why does it
introduce so much leg well to get the image looking as nice as possible some
algorithms look at the frames that are rendered before and after the frame to
the upscale to better understand what a high-res version of the same image is
supposed to look like then they apply
what they think are correct changes to the frame this method of analyzing
multiple frames that are held in what's called the frame buffer before they're
shown to the user can definitely yield visual improvements but not only is this
a computationally time-consuming process that adds leg it can also result in
worse image quality if the frames its examining or highly compressed for
example if you're watching a movie and I'll turn it of approach to reduce lag
is to instead of relying on multiple frames at one time have the algorithm
look at certain elements of a single frame that human brains are typically
sensitive to for example Mercedes mercy Mercedes mercy Mercedes M classics Mart
HDMI cable has a built-in library of objects like edges and textures that we
naturally key and on think about how jaggies caused by bad anti-aliasing of
edges are often really noticeable to us interestingly characters eyes are also a
focus as humans are psychologically programmed to be very sensitive to what
someone else's eyes are doing this kind of strategy of focusing mostly on key
visual elements can greatly reduce lag time while improving visual quality due
to its reliance on predetermined visual cues for the algorithm to focus on as
well as the fact it only examines one frame but like other upsampling methods
it's not perfect so can we do better it
turns out the answer is yes though we might still be some years away from
seeing it becoming widely available rather than programming a staler to spot
a few specific elements computer scientists have been training artificial
intelligences to recognize what more complex objects are supposed to look
like accurately stealing an HD image to 4k or even a K is a very computationally
intensive problem so large amounts of AI training will reduce the reliance of
predefined features and allow a scaler to recognize anything from whether or
not an object is a dog to how it handles scenes with complicated lighting we're
already seeing this to some extent with NVIDIA x' deep learning super sampling
or a dl SS where a supercomputer is fed
with lots of frames from different games and figures out an algorithm to produce
something close to an ideally anti-aliased image these algorithms are
then pushed out to individual users through software updates not only does
this allow gamers to improve how their games look without lowering frame rates
the more efficient post processing algorithms optimized through AI should
hopefully make games feel more responsive as well but remember that if
you just suck at games like csgo because you have straight-up terrible reflexes
AI probably won't help you so you might
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