Whether you want to use AI upscaling or not, many modern games basically force
you. That is, if you want to turn up all the details and still get playable frame
rates. But I don't want to shell out for a new graphics card just to unlock a
feature that I never really wanted in the first place. There's got to be a way
to squeeze more out of the GPU I already
have. And there is. It's one of the best kept open secrets to get more
performance for your dollar and cost just $6.99. Nice. Or $420 on sale. Extra
nice. It's made by one developer. And the best part is it works on pretty much
any graphics card, new or old, in every
game. Meet Lossless Scaling, an app that
can both upscale your games from lower resolutions and even use frame
generation to multiply your FPS by as much as you want, albeit with mixed
results once you get past a certain point. And that's not all. Man, I need
to see this for myself. on these systems
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To start things off, both David and I are going to be experiencing Doom: The
Dark Ages on a 4070Ti at 4K high without
any form of scaling or frame generation. This is really a great example of a
modern game that really doesn't run perfect if you're not using any kind of
cheat. So, why don't we cheat? Crl Alt S
will toggle loss of scaling, which we've configured with two times frame gen,
which is a lot smoother, but like any frame
generation technology, I'm still feeling 40 FPS worth of input latency. With that
said, I was expecting the image quality of those interpolated frames to be
worse. >> Oh, it's really not bad. >> It's really not bad. I think if I didn't
know frame gen was on, I would have a hard time immediately recognizing that
it was, >> which is both a good thing and a bad one. >> Yes. Okay, now you've tried the two time
multiplier. Do you want to go higher? >> I do want to go higher.
>> This is your first look at this interface, too.
>> Super straightforward. >> So clean. >> Multiplier. Oh god. Okay,
>> just try three to start. >> Okay,
it's definitely smoother, but now I'm really getting that uncanny.
It almost feels like um like motion's
moving on my TV, >> you know, like it's not right. >> Yeah. But I mean, when you look back
over at this native 4K, which experience do you think you'd rather have?
>> I'm looking for motion anomalies and they're not they're there, but they're
not bad. >> Well, I had reason to believe that this would be substantially worse frame gen
than the stuff that NVIDIA and AMD has, but it's pretty darn good.
>> But can I multiply it even more? >> Oh, yeah. I'm going to 5x.
>> That's more than NVIDIA can do. >> So, I have about 45 FPS native. Oh, wow.
Oh, that's interesting. It's not even pretending that I'm able to do much more
than about Oh, no. That is about 5x right now. >> It's just your base frame rate drops so
much because so much computation is happening on your graphics card,
>> right? So, there's a reason that NVIDIA
capped out their solution at 4x. It's
just so costly on the compute side that you're not getting enough base FPS to
even get a net benefit from it. Interesting.
>> Yeah, the higher your multiplier goes, the more I think native is the better
choice. >> Yeah, this is not only not a better
experience than what I was trying before, but this is not a good
experience. What we want to explore next is fixed versus adaptive frame gen. So
fixed is just the multiplier like NVIDIA has, but adaptive will add in between
frames to hit a set frame rate. Sort of like a computational variable refresh
rate to oversimplify it a lot. So instead of having my multiplier, I'm
going to go adaptive and I'm going to say I want to game at I think 120 is
asking a lot at these settings, but maybe I want to game at about 85 FPS. I
think that's a really nice sweet spot. It's much much better feeling than 60,
but not so intense as like 120 or more.
My base frame rate really is still a little bit too low.
>> Mhm. >> Like 40 feels input laggy. I would
probably want to turn this game down a little bit, but in terms of the
smoothness, it looks pretty darn good.
>> Well, I'm not playing, so I can't ascertain the input latency, but in terms of visuals, that looks high
refresh rate. It looks great. >> It looks really good. You can do 120
though. >> Uh, I wouldn't. It It feels too uncanny.
Like the the disconnect between how the latency feels and how the smoothness
looks is just too great. >> There's actually one more slider we can
mess around with to change the performance. So, why don't you switch to
loss of scale and I'll show you. This is the flow scale. Basically, it's the size
of the images that are going into loss of scale. So, it takes the full screen
and then it lowers the resolution to process that uh the lower your flow
scale is. And so right now the sweet spot's between 50 and 60% which is where
we are. But you could theoretically get a better image out of the higher flow
scale cuz there's more information for it to process and more performance at
the low end because those images are being shrunk and processed faster. >> Interesting. So let's try 40. Sure.
>> Okay. So turning it down is supposed to give me like maybe less computational
overhead >> a little bit. It seems like you're like a few frames higher, but then you might
notice more anomalies in your generation. >> What a great utility. Can you imagine a
world where like GPU vendors just built stuff like this that's completely
platform agnostic and just no nonsense. Here's the sliders. Here's what
everything does. There's no obfiscating what the actual performance is. Like
their FPS counter tells me how many real frames I have and then how many of them
are generated. >> So good. >> Like just don't mark it to me. Just tell me what it is.
>> So good. >> Obviously there are limitations and we're seeing them. But overall, if I
didn't see how well this worked with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe that this
could be made by just one person. How? Okay. Well, like many programs that
benefit from open- source projects, it's not actually one person, but one of the
most impressive pieces. Lossless scaling frame gen is. So, we reached out to the
creator of lossless scaling, who goes by the pseudonym THS, to explain how it
works. Loss of scaling frame generation is a convolutional neural network
developed from scratch. It takes only the final frame as input and
specifically in the LSFG3 version is capable of generating any number of
intermediate frames for arbitrary timestamps. This enables both adaptive
and any multiplier fixed modes. Compared to DSS or FSR which receive extensive
information from the game engine, LSFG operates with significantly less input
data. While this limits its potential output quality,
>> yeah, about that. Lacking motion vectors to help process the image and not being
able to differentiate HUD elements from game objects means that visual anomalies
can be pretty distracting in some situations. But it also gives LSFG a
major advantage in terms of a wide range of use cases. To ensure broad
compatibility across GPUs, the trained model was manually ported to DirectX11
compute shaders. Ellis captures via game frames and processes them via LSFG
shaders functioning effectively as a DirectX1 application that generates and
displays frames at the appropriate times based on the selected mode. That is
probably the coolest part. There is no requirement for specialized AI hardware
and DX11 GPUs have been mainstreamed for well over a decade now. So, yeah, the
image quality can only go so far, but just about anyone can take advantage of
it. There are some other caveats. A big
one is that you're going to want to keep your GPU usage to around 85% to avoid
spikes that really hurt lossless scaling's quality, which wait 85%? I
bought the whole GPU. I want to use the whole GPU.
Well, don't worry. Ths thought of that. Another super cool thing about lossless
scaling is that it can be run on a secondary GPU or even your integrated
graphics, which reduces the load on your primary gaming card and frees up a
little bit of extra performance. Now, our results with an iGPU were pretty
underwhelming, but the idea of an
upscaling co-processor is one that really intrigues me. A lot of people
have old GPUs kicking around. And hey, maybe this $7 piece of software can give
it a fresh razison on Desra. Let's give it a shot. Now, let's get this started.
There are a couple things that we changed from the B-roll, though. I actually ended up using the slot that
was right next to my primary card because it runs at 8x rather than 4x,
and the data rate to our secondary GPU actually does matter. The other thing
that we need to do is we have to unplug from our primary GPU and actually run
our display off of the secondary GPU.
So, this one drives the display, but this one is providing the main gaming
grunt. It's just routed through the secondary card. >> Uh, what does this do? The Velcro.
>> Oh, the Velcro is to push these cards apart a little bit so this one doesn't
overheat. >> ltstore.com.
Now, we just need to configure lossless scaling. So, we'll change our preferred GPU to RTX 2060. That's our preferred
GPU for scaling to use. Then we're going
to go into our graphics settings in Windows and we're going to change our default high performance GPU to our
faster one that we don't actually have our display plugged into. So for us,
that's a 4070 Ti. You may also find that
you need to add an exception for the specific game, but not always. Let's
lose the adaptive scaling for now then, and let's go back to trying like a a 3x
multiplier. feel like you're
>> Am I getting better performance than before? I feel like >> I think you are. It's as bad if not
worse than it was before. >> Okay.
And this sucks. >> This is really bad. Almost at 30 FPS.
>> Yeah. Which is not high enough for a good gaming experience.
>> You know what though? The 2060 is probably not powerful enough
to do 4K frame gen. So, you are at the mercy somewhat of the performance of
that secondary card. It can't just be like any ancient card if you're hoping
to run at the highest resolution in detail settings. Do we have like a 3060?
>> Yeah, we do. >> Oh, perfect. Okay, let's do that. I feel
good. It's going to work good this time. >> Oh, it's going to be so good this time.
>> If we' done like 2x frame gen or if we were running at a lower resolution with
that 2060, probably would have been fine. >> Mhm. >> But we want 4K gaming.
>> At least for now. >> 4K. Well, yeah. Here we go. Oh, here we
go. So, my native performance is exactly what I'd expect. Ctrl Alt S and
my native performance stays exactly the same and I get frame gen. This is the
best experience I've had with it so far. Okay, this is pretty this is pretty
good. Doesn't do anything about the latency, but wow, what a cool idea.
>> You want to see how high how high the number we can go? >> I mean, sure.
Yeah, I guess with the dedicated card, we could multiply higher.
>> Or will we? Because of the base resolution. >> Should I go to five this time? >> Yeah.
>> Okay, I'm going to five. I'm going to five, boys. Dude, look how smooth that
is. >> That's crazy smooth. It looks high refresh rate. It is, but it looks it.
>> Dude, I am getting a 5x frame gen
multiplier. >> Wow. It still feels in terms of input
lag like 40 FPS, but
>> artifacting is not immediately perceptible either. >> I mean, this is a pretty like, you know,
early 2000s brown filter over everything game, but
>> you lost your scaling. >> Oh, I did. >> Yeah. >> What just happened? Oh. Oh my god. I
think lost the scale. Oh, no. Wait, no, it's back. >> 200 frames.
>> No. Now, it's worth noting that the
resolution that I perceive in motion is
not as good as when I'm holding still. And that's a significant drawback of
these kinds of scaling technologies is that if they don't know which direction
an object is going because they don't have motion vector data from the game
engine, you're going to lose some of the clarity when you are in motion. I
wouldn't use this for a competitive game by any stretch of the imagination.
>> Look at your HUD. Look at that crosshair. Sometimes when you move
really fast,
>> you know what's funny is when I was playing I didn't even notice it though. >> But as wa as soon as you're looking for
it, it's crazy. >> Yeah, that's pretty bad.
>> We are doing 5x frame J though. >> And that's another thing that is a
disadvantage when you don't have any kind of input from the game like hey
maybe uh don't alter these HUD elements.
>> It's something he could add in too. In ReShade, you can separate HUD elements
manually. And so I could see on a game-game basis allowing people to have
the HUD be processed separately from the rest of the scaling. Maybe
>> maybe it'd be pretty tough because then you're losing some of the advantages of
this software is that it just kind of works on everything >> 100%.
>> And then you're building profiles again and then you're basically just doing what AMD and NVIDIA are doing.
>> Fair enough. >> Overall, I don't think there's a question that I would rather play with
this on >> maybe turn off the 5X so it doesn't look
as stupid. Yeah. Here, let's uh >> go back to two.
>> Let's Let's go to a more reasonable scaling multiplier. Maybe two.
>> Yeah. >> At this point, I don't think there's much of a question. I would
>> Now that Now you're seeing the the thing, it's like it's
>> Yeah, >> it wasn't as bad before. >> I think it's even worse. That's
interesting. Okay, look. Let me try yours again. Oh,
okay. Uh, no, no, no. It's fine. It's fine. It
doesn't matter. It's just like I was questioning whether I would turn this on
and I'm like, "Oh, maybe neither of these are what I would configure because
I would want a higher base frame rate regardless, even if it means turning
down some details." But there's no question that the software is pretty
impressive. And we haven't even touched on the actual scaling that it was
originally named for. ths said that the reason they originally made lossless
scaling was that they bought a 4K monitor for coding and their computer
couldn't handle it for gaming. Now, obviously, you can just run your monitor
at a non-native resolution, but at the time, graphics drivers could only do
nasty hobbits soft by linear scaling.
Yuck. So ths developed the first version
to make sharp, sexy integer scaling a
breeze and then just kept adding features until we got the flexible array
of options that we're left with today. It's even great for non-gaming
applications. Do you love anime? Well, you can boost the sharpness with anime
4K. More into emulating retro games? THS
included XBR scaling to make pixel art games really look their best. And if you
want to scale your demanding 3D games, well, hey, you can try AMD's Fidelity
Effects Super Resolution FSR or NVIDIA Image Scaling even in games that don't
support them. That versatility and the convenient package it's wrapped in is
genuinely fantastic. Let's try using FSR. Let's start with Doom: The Dark
Ages, which actually does support FSR. So, David is going to turn it on in
game, and then I am going to turn it on using lossless scaling. I'm also going
to disable my secondary GPU cuz that's not really apples to apples otherwise.
So, I guess I want the optimized version, a nonoriginal optimized version
of AMD FSR, which is better for less powerful.
>> Yeah, let's leave that off. Sharpness, let's leave that in the middle.
>> Sure. >> To do that, I need to set my game to borderless windowed. And then I'm going
to set my resolution to whatever I would want my input resolution to be for my
scaling technology. So, let's go with 1080p. I I want to really play at a high
frame rate. No. Now we go into lossless
scaling and we set our type to FSR.
We're just going to leave it on auto, I guess. Right. Will that do a a 2x
factor? >> Well, it's going to bring it to whatever your monitor's resolution is.
>> Oh, brilliant. Okay. Oh, yeah. Right.
I'm definitely scaling because I was running at that lower resolution before.
And if it's not on, it's running like this. And if it's on, it's running like
that. That's a lot of tearing. >> We are running into some vssync issues.
I've noticed >> there's limitations based on the monitor's refresh rate when you're using
loss of scaling. And because we're going to a capture that is limited to 60,
>> we are going to be kind of locked around 60 even if you turn VSYNC off and
everything. >> Let's lose the capture then and we'll just use the over the shoulder. Wait,
how are you at 93 FPS? >> I FSR is on. >> Oh, that's right. I forgot.
>> Okay, so now we're pixel peeping a little bit. Why Why don't we just play
for a little bit first? Hey, I'm getting more FPS than you. >> Yeah, I just want to make sure that my
settings are correct. FSR performance would be 1080p.
>> Ooh, now I'm not feeling the latency, boys. >> Well, those are real frames. They're
just lower resolution. >> You know what, man? They're They look
pretty okay to me. >> Yeah, I can't immediately tell the difference in sharpness between ours.
Oh, I'm about I'm up at 100 now. Performance is quite similar. And mine
was easier to set up than yours was.
>> That's fair. >> Had a little finicky problems. It's
definitely not as sharp. Like I'm looking at these chains that there's
baddies kind of hanging down from or whatever. Like
>> same with mine. The native FSR is not
perfect. >> Now, is this supposed to be as good as
proper integrated FSR? >> I
don't think so because I think the integrated FSR gets access to a little
more information than just the output frame. >> It really doesn't look that different to
me, though. I mean, can you do the can you do me a favor and go find that chain again and then just like do the same
back and forth cuz I've got crazy ghosting on mine.
>> Whoa, buddy. Mine's not doing it.
>> Huh. I would have assumed that the one built into Doom would be better, but I
don't know if that's necessarily true. >> Another big one is distant foliage. So,
let's just find a a tree or something to look at. Here we go. On these against
these mountains or like these birds and stuff behind you. >> Behind.
>> Up there. Yeah, I am not perceiving a
major difference here. >> No. >> Oh, you know what? No, this tree is
better on yours. >> Yeah, you're right. >> Definitely.
>> Yeah. >> So, it looks like it's going to be a bit of a mixed bag. But what's cool about
lossless scaling is I have all other kinds of different options. Which one
you want? >> LS1. >> LS1. Let's do it. >> That's the scaling that they built.
>> Uh, yeah. >> I don't think it's as good as that. >> Uh, yeah. Well, let's look at the chain.
>> Yeah, the tree is not as good. I can tell you that much for sure. Hey, my chain's still better than your chain,
though. Got them. This is so crazy. >> I mean, that's the thing with all of
these technologies is they do tend to be a bit of a mixed bag. And you're going to have to play around and find out what
works best for you. And again, what's cool about loss of scaling is that I
don't even need the game to support it at all. So, why don't we fire up a game that doesn't support lossless scaling,
like uh Halo Infinite? >> No. >> What? Why? Because
>> why am I why do you guys never let me play Halo Infinite on set anymore? >> Well, first off, you play too long.
Secondly, because of the way Halo Infinite does its resolution, we can't
change it to a smaller size to scale up. So, it won't work with loss of scaling
in that way. >> Yay, Halo Infinite.
>> Woohoo. And I'm getting more FPS, boys.
Not by that much. >> As for image quality, uh, let's have a
look here. Why? Hey, meet me at the bazaar. >> The bazaar. >> The bazaar.
>> Stop it. I'm doing a video. Leave me alone. You shouldn't put so many bots in
the game then. >> I don't think you get the option to change much.
>> Okay, let's see. I mean, yeah, I'm upscaling from 1440,
but like this is pretty good. >> Yeah,
>> the text is a little fuzzy. Like that's noticeable to me, but like I have to go
looking for it. >> Yeah, >> not bad. Of course, I'm not getting a
huge performance benefit right now either. I'm getting about the same frame
rate that you are. Wait, do I not have it on? I do have it on because I have my
performance counter. >> I'm going to turn on frame view as well, just for LS.
>> Yeah, >> my image quality looks darn near the same as yours, but my FPS is also darn
near the same as yours. So, >> yeah, you're doing a little bit better than me. I'd be interested to try the
adaptive frame rate. Uh, I think that's one of the cool use cases for it. If you
have an old esports monitor that doesn't support variable refresh rate, you can
kind of just force it computationally and hit a consistent frame rate even if
some of those frames are generated. >> Okay, let's turn on frame gen and have a
look at how things go. >> Okay, so I love that this. The first
thing I think when I see LSFG is let's go.
Okay, I'm going to try 2x multiplier to start with the higher input frame rate.
Dude, obviously it doesn't feel quite right.
>> It looks really smooth. >> I can force it to artifact. Like look at
this crane in the back. >> Oh yeah. >> Like I can make it kind of do weird
stuff, but it's not the sort of thing that I would notice if I was just
playing the game. >> No. >> Okay, hold on. Let me try yours for a
sec. Let me try yours for a sec. >> Dude, I would play on that one for sure.
>> No question, actually. Like I thought I was going to be like yes, well the pros
and cons you see they kind of somewhat outweigh or they don't outweigh like
>> and it's surprising this is kind of like an esports situation and I thought this
would be a totally something that is not in the wheelhouse of loss of scaling.
>> Okay, switch again. I want to see I want to confirm. >> It just goes to show that frame
generation is best in situations where you least need it. My base experience is
pretty good. It's just a little boosted by that frame gen. I got to say I like
it, which you might see as a reversal from my previous position where
generally I avoid upscaling or frame generation technologies whenever
possible. But there's a big difference to me between what AMD and especially
NVIDIA have been selling, which is fake frames for real dollars, and what ths is
selling, which is a shot of adrenaline for your older card for the very
reasonable price of $7. And I know that
some folks are still going to be adamantly against using scaling
technologies or frame generation technologies of any sort, but the
controls in here are granular enough that I think even if all you want is an
extra 5 or 10% headroom on an older cart or to hit a target frame rate, you might
appreciate having this tool in your toolkit and deciding for yourself if
it's worth the compromises. I guarantee
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