come on Twitch give me 4K already 20 bucks for premium are you kidding me
Netflix minus jeez don't do it RTX VSR
upscale uh look wow this is amazing put
away your wallets friends because with a free driver update NVIDIA RTX 30 and 40
series GPU can use AI to upscale any
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30 days using the link below NVIDIA's latest driver update version
53118 showed up with a pretty cool and
free feature called RTX video super resolution ution or VSR which is not to
be confused with AMD's virtual super
resolution AKA VSR using a 30 or 40 series graphics
card and a chromium based browser so it's Chrome and Edge for now with
plugins expected for others down the line you can take streamed content with
resolutions as low as 360p and upscale
them in real time all the way to 4K now
obviously we can't just take NVIDIA's word for this so we collected a library
of screen capture from a variety of genres and sent it to Mark our editor
and Resident upscaling nerd to see if he could spot the differences and while we
wait I am going to try it for myself
we've got not one not two but three displays hooked up to our RTX 3050
graphics card we chose the 3050 because it's the least expensive card with
support for the new feature for now it could conceivably come to 20 Series in
the future since they also have the tensor course that VSR relies on but I
wouldn't hold my breath for my test I'll be watching the same YouTube video on my
three identical screens but one is going to be YouTube's 1080p just blown up to
full screen in Firefox which if you recall doesn't currently support vssr
one is going to be YouTube's 1080p upscaled to 4K with vssr and the last
one will play at YouTube's native 4K uh
I did it again I'm back I'm ready but we did Skip something important setting it
up once you've got the right GPU and the latest driver you simply enable it in
the NVIDIA control panel under adjust video image settings you're going to
want to set RTX video enhancement to on and then quality level one is low with
quality level four being the highest the community consensus is that one kind of
sucks two and three suck less than one and four is pretty good so we've gone
with four this is a pretty recent video I can already tell that this is crap H
hold on no I think I was wrong I think that's crap you're not supposed to judge
the content of the video hey be
nice this is way harder than it should be um this is almost certainly native 4K
that's bad that's upscaled 4K 1080p upscaled yeah yes the truth is though
the only reason I can tell is that I
noticed the artifact cuz I'm looking for them if I wasn't looking for them holy
crap yeah the one on the right is it it's it's just less Sharp but
like wow even text it's just sharper
everything is sharper what's most surprising to me is how well it handles
things that are supposed to be out of focus anything that's blurred in the
background with a bokeh kind of softness
still is that big gray wall there's
nothing you can do about low bit rate wait I actually like the AI version
better than the native 4K 1 come check this out quick quick quick quick quick
oh I meant plof but yeah it's okay David I thought he meant you too you can see
kind of a smear it's better than the banding you're right it actually
looks better wait wait till after look
at this look at this though it goes along the wall I noticed it here yeah on
the plug yeah um yeah yeah I would
probably want to apply this filter to Native 4K content just low bit rate
content you could well no you can't that's the thing and you you actually
can't even check whether it's running or not kind of can you kind of can in the
meantime let's try something a little bit more challenging 1080p looks fine
enough it doesn't really need to be upscaled NC number 20 yeah you look so
cold I noticed thatth he didn't say cool it's cuz you don't have a beard yet yeah
not biased at all look how much sharper that license plate is that's pretty cool
obviously it's not making this text readable but whether I can read it or
not it's not as noticeably just a blurry
mess actually is it more readable holy
crap it is this guy's good he's got a promising career ahead of him I don't
think it's working right now I don't think so here no we can check I'm 99%
sure it's not working oh so it's the 3050 so we're not going to see a power Spike so we actually need to go to uh
GPU usage well we should see some power it it like barely change it almost
doesn't change on the 3050 the 3070 and the 3080 were're hitting like 90% usage
right oh it's using the 3D barely though but
it's also wait it looks better now see this license plate is actually like
Clarity IED now the skin smoothing is
not always natural especially with more challenging Source material like this
but the Box this cable the rubber grommets definitely cleaned up no it's
working look at the keyboard too way sharper oh yeah the mouse this looks
like a blurry blob that looks like an actual Mouse yeah I notice it mostly on
the license plate and then on the uh water drop looks way cleaner right
you're right the headlights too yeah it's definitely working on the 3050 I
just I I don't what's on the power are we going to get a bunch of videos done
this week uh we're going to get eight but we're not going to get nine yeah I don't think that was realistic yeah
script review went a little long we were playing around with VSR too much that
was work it was work it's that cool hey it's that cool it's really cool what
about non YouTube though theoretically this should work on anything streaming
through a chromium web browser but that raises a lot of questions what about
plex uh what about dear unprotected content like
Netflix uh I don't know I have premium
so I had to create a new Netflix account in order to test this but once I did and
I was streaming at 720p the difference is well in Seinfeld not that noticeable
because David yes as you pointed out when we were talking off camera it's
already been digitally enhanced so what we found is that it doesn't really seem
to do anything you know I'm noticing it more now plof the film grain is kind of
like coming in and out of existence that's that's what was happening with
Malcolm in the Middle yeah that's really unfortunate it just doesn't know how to
handle it it thinks it's I'm pretty sure it thinks it's an object and it's like oh I got to sharpen that object but no
it's film grain it should be trying to denoise or it could think that it's
blocking and it's trying to smooth it sure yeah quite undesirable but if we
take something relatively new that's just running at a lower resolution holy
crap 720p up to 4 this looks incredible
if you told me this was 720p I would tell you to piss off you can see it
though when the van was just going past there there was a bunch of smearing on
the very tail end of the Winnebago I wouldn't notice it if I was just
watching the video though especially from a little oh and the grass there
it's it was getting confused with the smoke and the grass in front but yeah
when I'm looking for it man I can see it yeah obviously if we pause it we're
going to find problems but in motion look at the calculator watch just all
the tree branches stuff o yikes that
wobble there on the badge it does look sharper than it should but it's clearly
getting confused yeah look at Smithers wobbling around here some of the lines
also get a little too thin or thick on the cell shading cuz it doesn't know
what to do with it yeah I think anyway doesn't know what to do so even look
look at the money the money flickering and we can we can maybe test this easily
by just opening up the control panel and then turning it off and hitting apply to
there's still some wobble it might just be the animation when like the frames
cuz it's all on moving stuff right and so they're going to have to do frame and
everything you just have really no that's that's in the original video yeah
oh I don't think it does much for Simpsons I think it's too simple of a
cartoon it's really you know solid colors and blocks right um people were
reporting that older animes we're looking a lot sharper and cleaner
um but I haven't checked anything out yet I'm going down to 480p I just want
to see this this movie has such a unique animation Style I want to see how it
handles it honestly though I would take this over not
upscaled this back this back wall here and stuff okay okay now we go back 20
seconds it's still kind of bad it's pretty bad it's better but we're pushing
the absolute limits of what it can do this is an extremely challenging
scenario just because of the way the shading is done in this movie the way
the textures kind of naturally look blocky in a lot of cases I would
definitely just have this on all the time if I watched stuff like this you
think so yeah even with your 4k monitor
with your high internet bandwidth and no
no well yeah but sometimes it's down to what content is available if you're
watching older shows that are simply not available in 4k or even 1080 I'd want it
on there's definitely some artifacting particularly around edges or in between
and around fast moving objects in text but it works and it does so in real time
shockingly well so how does it work I mentioned RTX tensor course before these
are machine learning specialized Hardware blocks they're actually the
same ones that NVIDIA uses for their dlss game upscaling technology but
instead of making your game look sharper they're using them to remove blocky
compression artifacts while upscaling video content like dlss each frame gets
analyzed and then checked against NVIDIA's deep Learning Network which has
been trained on a wide variety of content then rendered the way the
machine thinks it should be unlike dlss
this is solely using the lower resolution video frame as its input data
and it only works on video content so there's no motion vectors or depth
buffers to work with no game engine data nothing and they want to make it very
clear that vssr is using a completely different algorithm really it's a lot
more like video enhance AI from topaz Labs an upscaler that we've used before
except instead of selecting from a bunch of presets and changing values depending
on how aggressive you want the upscaler to be you're left with a simple onoff
switch and then an opaque quality drop down video upscaling typically works by
using an interpolation algorithm to make up the empty space that would be left if
we upscaled a 1080p frame which is roughly 2 million pixels to a 4K frame
which is over 8 million those extra pixels they don't just automatically get
filled in whether it's the display your
computer or a media playback device like a Blu-ray player or the NVIDIA Shield
something needs to First analyze the signal Source resolution then hopefully
apply noise reduction followed by Edge and texture sharpening to produce a
clearer image the way deep learning changes this approach involves using
algorithms that analyze video qualities like line light and color it is
constantly learning and improving the more that it's used to create a more
correct final frame with fewer mistakes and artifacts so it will look at an
image and detect blurry objects then try
to guess what the objects are and if they're supposed to be blurry or not and
fill in the missing pixels we saw this firsthand with dlss 1.0 it worked but it
looked pretty awful in scenarios that had lots of little lines close together
like chain link fences since then dlss has massively improved and I am hoping
oping that we will see something similar here just like I'm hoping to see some of
our new desk pads hitting your desks the next time we inevitably roast your
setups LTD store.com this Tech is exciting for the reasons we've shown you
already like saving money on a 4K Netflix subscription but also for some
less obvious ones twitch for example does not offer any way to broadcast or
view in 4k but we found that vssr does
an amazing job of sharpening up the image whether it's just great technology
or NVIDIA's gaming Heritage showing here we're not sure but the bottom line is
that it works really well even Those ads looked better there's other use cases
too what about rural users who might even have a library of Premium high
resolution content but are concerned about bandwidth use older content is
another area where VSR shines or doesn't broadly speaking the community is loving
the effect on streams of older standard DEA anime but we fired up some Malcolm
in the Middle which looks like it was shot on 16 mm film and NVIDIA's current
upscaling solution doesn't seem to play nicely with all the film grain it's
shockingly bad even though our source is 108p it manages to look worse when we
upscale to 4K similarly when we were upscaling The Simpsons it seems to get a
little confused by the cell shading and I would say at best results in no real
Improvement so what's the drawback nothing's ever free right well while our
RTX 3050 seems content with upscaling at
a similar wattage to what it uses while just playing back video the RTX 380 in
my workstation that we used when we were reviewing the script was a completely
different story upscaling 720p Netflix I saw anywhere from 80 to 120 watts of
power usage but upscaling 1080p 60fps
twitch like this saw my power settle in at over 300 watts on the GPU alone that
was without an obvious difference in upscaling quality compared to this 3050
unfortunately for many people around the world then that's a trade-off they might
not be willing to make not everyone seems to be seeing the same high power
consumption but we can only report on what we observe and that means that if
you have the same kind of power consumption we do and you have a
high-end gaming PC if you watch Just 4 hours a day of upscaled content that
could cost you $230 a year in the UK the EU average is
just 25 cents per kilowatt hour right now which will cut that number in half
but some countries like Germany are right alongside the UK I mean that point
you might as well just pay for the premium subscription it's nearly as
energy intensive as mining except this time there's no cash reward to offset
the power usage when we monitor the GPU usage of the card though we can see why
it's happening rather than taxing the GPU's video decoding Block it's actually
hitting the 3D rendering Hardware that means that if you're a multitasker and
you like to have a twitch stream up on your second monitor while you are gaming
vssr is going to have a significant impact on your actual gaming performance
the good news is that depending on the resolution of your secondary monitor
vssr is unlikely to be active at all times NVIDIA can detect both the quality
of the source file and the window size of the player what that means is vssr is
only turned on where it's warranted and you can see this with our GPU usage as I
go from Window mode to full screen mode
it's not perfect at the moment it works about as well as if you upscaled a video
file with the Artemis preset NVIDIA enhance AI but that's not real time and
it's something that you have to premeditate right so this is pretty sick
but you can expect a lot of blur around boxes of text um people can look a
little too soft or too plasticky and trying to upscale from lower resolutions
is still like trying to squeeze blood from a stone but for a first try
technically second if you count the NVIDIA Shield Pro it does a pretty good
job and I am thoroughly impressed if you guys enjoyed this video make sure to
check out the time we tried upscaling my first video on the Sunbeam tunic Tower
it didn't go that well