What is NVIDIA Ansel?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
858 words · ~4 min read
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Not too long ago, video games were mostly an experience for whomever was
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playing the game and maybe one or two other people looking over his or her
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shoulder. But nowadays, people are not only looking for powerful rigs to play
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their games, but also the ability to show off their Minecraft creations and
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illconceived Sim cities to the world.
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With this in mind, NVIDIA recently rolled out Anzel, a new platform to give
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users greater flexibility when taking screenshots. Now, I know that those of
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you who are regular game streamers are saying, "Come on,
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Lionus. I can just take screenshots by
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screen capping my Twitch stream or I don't know, pressing print screen or
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whatever. What's the big deal with this Anel business?" Well, traditional
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screenshot capture is often limited by whatever frame your GPU is pushing out
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to your monitor or to your stream at any given time. I mean, that's what you
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capture. So, if you want to show a precise moment in a particular game, you
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have to hope that the in-game camera has things at just the angle that you want.
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One of the key features of Anzel is removal of this limit by placing a
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freely movable virtual camera into the
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game that you can actually reposition to
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anywhere that you'd like to get your screenshots just the way you want them.
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In addition to a time freezing option for finer levels of control, kind of
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like bullet time in the Matrix. And speaking of bullet time, there's also a
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360 degree option that allows gamers to
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take a shot of the entire in-game
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environment, which gets stored as an image that's properly viewable on a VR
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headset like the Rift, Vive, or Google Cardboard if you want your gaming
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accomplishments or memories to have that extra level of immersion. Another cool
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thing is it gives you an idea of what it might be like to step into your favorite
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game. But if you'd like to show finer details instead of concerning yourself
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with VR, such as if you like posting game walkthroughs online, for example,
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you might like Anel's super resolution feature that will actually render the
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frame that you want with super sampling for a clean looking image at up to
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61K. So, yes, a lot higher than 4K and
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pretty freaking cool if you want a massive wall print of your favorite shot
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of your favorite title, such as the interesting scenery in games like No
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Man's Sky. Built-in HDR and
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post-processing effects, I mean, effectively like Instagram looking
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stuff, will help you customize the look of your screenshots further without
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having to use a program like Photoshop. But if you're a pro at image editing,
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you can actually also get the images in RAW format, so you can play with them to
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your heart's content later on. But
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there's a caveat. There always is, isn't there? As good as all of this sounds,
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exactly which Ansel features you'll be able to use depends on the game. So keep
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that in mind before you rush to try it out. The good news, though, is that
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Ansel is supported on quite a large number of recent GPUs. actually anything
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on the NVIDIA side that is a GTX 600
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series or higher. So, you may not even need an expensive upgrade to start
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taking these fancy screenshots. And as the popularity of sharing game
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accomplishments as well as home virtual reality continues to grow, I hope to see
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something like this coming from AMD as well. I mean, after all, if you want to
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