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Editorial NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution Tested, AI Enhanced Streaming That Barely Makes a Difference

dgianstefani

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NVIDIA has leveraged their expertise in neural networks and deep learning to release an interesting new feature with their R530 driver branch, an AI video stream upscaler designed to take advantage of RTX Tensor Cores when playing video content within Chromium based browsers. Our previous news article on RTX Video Super Resolution (VSR) covered the release of Chrome 110 stable, which included support for this technology. The latest version of Microsoft Edge, based on Chromium, also officially supports RTX VSR. Owners of NVIDIA RTX graphics cards may have been puzzled by exactly how to enable this feature however, either in Chrome 110 or in the NVIDIA Control Panel, since the relevant 'NvidiaVpSuperResolution' setting is enabled by default within Chrome, but the required accompanying driver has only just been released, three weeks later.






To use RTX VSR, you'll need a RTX 30 or 40-series graphics card, be running the latest NVIDIA GeForce Graphics Driver, and have enabled the "RTX Video Enhancement" option within the NVIDIA Control Panel, under the "Adjust video image settings" submenu. There are four quality presets, with "1" being the lowest and "4" being the highest, while also using the most GPU resources. Owners of RTX 20-series cards will have to wait for NVIDIA to enable this functionality for their GPUs, once the engineering work is completed for that architecture.



Some comparison screenshots, taken on my personal system with a 3080 Ti and a 1440p monitor, it seems the technology is most noticeable when applied to videos at 720p resolution and below.

Similar to the well received NVIDIA Shield TV, which could take 720p or 1080p content and upscale it to 4K at up to 30 frames per second using the AI hardware within the Tegra X1+, RTX VSR is a further, more advanced development. Using the more powerful hardware on modern RTX graphics cards, RTX VSR automatically upscales content played from within your browser between 360p and 1440p, to 4K, improving detail and removing the compression artifacts streamed content is known for.

NVIDIA's RTX VSR FAQ and blog post answers some common questions and provides further details on how the technology works.

You can take a look at NVIDIA's comparison video or try enabling the feature yourself to decide how well NVIDIA's efforts have paid off. As we've seen with other AI based deep learning solutions, the technology will continue to improve with time. In it's current state, RTX VSR seems particularly well suited for increasing the clarity of videos uploaded at lower resolutions or bitrates, such as older videos or live streamed content from Twitch or YouTube. Those using capped or slower network connections limiting their streaming options should also appreciate being able to efficiently consume content without sacrificing too much in image quality. I can't wait to see where the iterative path leads, as this technology could be as impactful in video media as AI based upscalers were for gaming!


Update: After further testing of a YouTube stream of in game content, set to 480p and 720p, isolated differences between RTX VSR enabled at setting '4' and disabled can be shown.





Looking closely at the barrels, trees, textures on the surfaces, text on the container, and straight lines for example the roof of the service station, we can see image quality improvements with RTX VSR enabled and set to '4' quality.

While these image quality improvements certainly exist, I have some questions as to how many owners of RTX 30 and 40-series graphics cards spend their time watching low resolution streams, since improvements are much less obvious when using higher resolution source material. This technology seems ideally suited to portable applications, where there is limited internet bandwidth available, such as smartphones on mobile networks, or laptops on the go using slow wireless connections. Unfortunately, NVIDIA requires laptops to be plugged into mains power to use RTX VSR, due to the additional power drawn by the Tensor Cores required for image processing (most laptops would use iGPU via Optimus under light graphics loads, and RTX VSR requires the discrete GPU to be active), and there are no smartphones that have RTX features. The way I see it, it's a zero effort (after initial setup, which takes a minute or so) way to get slightly better image quality, scaling less as you go up in source resolution, with a negligible draw on system resources. There is also the case where many older videos from the earlier days of the internet tend to be only available in relatively low resolution, so this technology can certainly come into play to offer a more contemporary image quality.

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The screenshots comparision gives me the impression that this is more or less just a sharpening and noise filter. Maybe in other contents the improvements will be more noticeable. When it gets enabled for the RTX-20 series, I'll try it out myself.
 
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Looking at the photos, I see nothing amazing, in fact nothing to talk about. It's like applying a blur filter to smooth the final result. And while in still frames that could be seen as improvement - in my opinion it's not - are we sure the result is not loss of detail when considering the video itself?

Then again, this is an EDITORIAL. So an opinion, right? Well it looks more like a press release to me. To me. I might be wrong here. Just an opinion.
 
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Everything looks the same when enabled what a bunch of lies, all this talk about making low quality videos look better is all fake
 

izy

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Can be good to be used with GeForce Now or something like that , i dont see much use in other cases (unless u have a dog internet connection).
 
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The screenshots comparision gives me the impression that this is more or less just a sharpening and noise filter. Maybe in other contents the improvements will be more noticeable. When it gets enabled for the RTX-20 series, I'll try it out myself.
It’s definitely not just a sharpening/noise filter.
 
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Can be good to be used with GeForce Now or something like that , i dont see much use in other cases (unless u have a dog internet connection).
It upscales internet videos. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet is. A 480p video will look bad regardless. This improves those low-res videos.

Everything looks the same when enabled what a bunch of lies, all this talk about making low quality videos look better is all fake
It’s not fake. You’re not using it if you can’t see the difference.

what a bunch of snake oil.
You clearly haven’t used it. It’s very real.
 
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I have to be honest, this is extremely underwhelming. This doesn't even look as good as FSRCNNX with MPV and you can run this on pretty much any modern GPU. The newer ONNYX models blow this away.
 
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It upscales internet videos. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet is. A 480p video will look bad regardless. This improves those low-res videos.


It’s not fake. You’re not using it if you can’t see the difference.


You clearly haven’t used it. It’s very real.
Im testing it and I see zero different for improving quality of a low quality video...Your clearly not using it.
 
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I couldn't tell the difference, disabled after 5min.
 

izy

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It upscales internet videos. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet is. A 480p video will look bad regardless. This improves those low-res videos.


It’s not fake. You’re not using it if you can’t see the difference.


You clearly haven’t used it. It’s very real.
I mean it could be used with GeForce NOW if its really good , you can upscale the games from 1080p to 4k, cheaper subscription , less bandwidth etc.
 
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I mean it could be used to GeForce NOW if its really good , you can upscale the games from 1080p to 4k, cheaper subscription , less bandwidth etc.
I mean I thought the idea was to take low quality video from any quality not just 1080p to 4K cause I cant really tell alot of difference from 1080p to 4K certailly cant see any difference from 360p to 1080p Just looks the same to me all I see if the gpu doing work...

1677606374935.png
.
 
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yeah im not impressed, this is a bit FSR 1.0 ish....
 

dgianstefani

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Amazing is a very strong term...
Has been revised. I had a different title in mind initially but changed it to amazing after feedback and suggestions leading to minor revisions prior to publishing. Editorial staff agrees amazing is a little strong.

I do think this has quite the capacity for development, as we've seen from other AI upscaling technologies. This initial release is in no means a regression in quality anywhere from native, but has several, if minor, improvements. So it's a net positive.

I checked my task manager GPU usage, and it went from 9% playing the video at native to 10% with VSR at "4", so it's hardly a cost in terms of resources either.
 

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I did some tests on YouTube. I found that there is a minimum browser/tab size for upscaling to work. Put the MSI Afterbunner side by side with Chrome and resize the browser until "activating" the VSR.
 
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Has been revised. I had a different title in mind initially but changed it to amazing after feedback and suggestions leading to minor revisions prior to publishing. Editorial staff agrees amazing is a little strong.

I do think this has quite the capacity for development, as we've seen from other AI upscaling technologies. This initial release is in no means a regression in quality anywhere from native, but has several, if minor, improvements. So it's a net positive.

I checked my task manager GPU usage, and it went from 9% playing the video at native to 10% with VSR at "4", so it's hardly a cost in terms of resources either.
Uses more gpu when trying to use a lower quality video to higher quality but generally looks the same to me.
 
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Hi,
Yeah sounds just like switching monitor/ tv settings from standard to vivid :laugh:
 

izy

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I mean I thought the idea was to take low quality video from any quality not just 1080p to 4K cause I cant really tell alot of difference from 1080p to 4K certailly cant see any difference from 360p to 1080p Just looks the same to me all I see if the gpu doing work...

View attachment 285804.
I got what you are saying my thought was if you could use it with GeForce Now maybe for that type of video could do a better job and it can be a win/win , less money for subscription and less load on the nvidia servers , less bandwidth used etc.. not sure about latency.
 
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Amazing lol, Jensen really wants its lackey's in the tech press to promote this tosh.
 
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This whole advertising being able to take a low quality video on youtube make it high quality to get around subscriptions for now is just a gimmick its not actually the truth. Nvidia yet again needs to be called out for the lies they have told everyone...and trying to hype another product that doesnt actually hold true just like atomic heart.
 

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For each video resolution chosen for playback on YouTube, there is a minimum browser window size for the feature to work. The higher the original resolution, the larger the window size.
 
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As a side-note Jay Two-Cents was gushing about this 4K TV on YouTube a few weeks ago: LG 55QNED85UQA. It has a "Picture Quality Enhancement Technology" (LG's term) setting that in Jay's video appeared to actually do something. Of course at the price it's selling for at the moment I'll never buy one.
 
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