Nvidia Corporation: (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been on a roll lately with the release of the industry-leading RTX 4080 and 4090 GPUs, subsequent DLSS3 and RT enhancements. Given the multiple announcements that the chipmaker made during CES 2023, it is easy to overlook something that is shaping up to become one of its most exciting technology releases for the year.
It must be noted that this is not the first time that Nvidia has toyed with enhancing video output. Nvidia’s Control Panel in its current iteration already has multiple options that allow tweaks such as Edge enhancement, Noise Reduction, Deinterlacing and presets for Internet Video. Nvidia’s Shield TV and Shield TV Pro also have made inroads in this regard, offering enhanced and AI-enhanced modes for video playback.
Nvidia’s Video Super Resolution however builds further onto this enhancement and significantly so. While it will be supported by all RTX cards eventually, Nvidia’s RTX Video Super Resolution will support the RTX 3000 and RTX 4000 series GPUs at launch. Support for the RTX 2000 lineup will be added later down the line. It is expected to be supported by a multitude of apps as well as web browsers. The first RTX VSR-compatible application has however already been sighted as Google’s Chrome version 110 natively supports Nvidia’s upscaling tech by default; It does however currently not function as it waits for Nvidia to add driver-level support for the technology later this year. The feature does however seem to require addition GPU power or juice so it would need to be manually turned on in some cases, generally when external power is available as stated by Nvidia’s senior software engineer Romain Pokrzywka. He added that the option could be toggled on or off at a global level if required via the Nvidia control panel. He further stated that the option to use the technology would be available for driver versions 530.XX and above as the engineering team was targeting the deployment of VSR with this driver version.
Nvidia until recently did not have a hard timeline committed as to when we would see VSR in action this year but it seems we might be seeing it sooner rather than later as Nvidia’s forum admin detailed that we would be able to use the tech in the coming weeks with a targeted launch date somewhere later this month for driver versions in the R530 branch. Nvidia released driver update 528.49 earlier this week which sees support for laptop RTX GPUs kick off. It remains to be seen how effective VSR will be as a technology enhancement or if it can live up to its commitments for end users. It could after all, as one comment said in the thread on the Nvidia forums just fizzle out as “vaporware”.
