RTX Video Super Resolution Now Available on Chrome and Edge for RTX 30 and 40 series owners

[Haaselh0ff]

Summary

 

RTX 30 and 40 series Owners REJOICE! Nvidia has launched with their latest drivers an option to allow for video upscaling on most all video services (Twitch, Netflix, Youtube, I'd assume even Floatplane). The feature uses AI and RTX Tensor cores to work it's magic and increase the sharpness and clarity of the video.

Quotes

Quote

Available today with the new Game Ready Driver, RTX Video Super Resolution uses AI and RTX Tensor Cores to improve the quality of video watched in a Chrome or Edge browser by removing blocky compression artifacts and upscaling video resolution. This improves video sharpness and clarity, and lets people watch online content – whether from Twitch, YouTube, Netflix or Hulu – in its native resolution on high-resolution displays up to 4K.

 

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Users can specify quality levels between 1 (lowest) to 4 (highest). Higher quality levels will result in sharper images and improved artifact reduction. Higher quality levels require additional GPU resources, so if users need more horsepower to run creative apps or games while playing video, the quality level can be adjusted. All 30 and 40 series RTX GPUs are able to comfortably upscale using quality level 1, and xx70 class or higher are able to play most content at quality level 4.

 

My thoughts

I'm always easily impressed by these Upscaling initiatives Nvidia does. This seems like a huge win to me but with some caveats. The image you'll see is not TRUE 4K in a similar vein to DLSS upscaling to 4K isn't. You will still lose out on minor details but the benefits of something like this could be very nice for some people. Need to save bandwidth but love that 4K look? Go to 1080p and upscale that bad boy to 4K. Imagine how much lower bandwidth consumption could be with AV1 Encoding + This tech for 4K, super curious to see that one. Hoping they bring it to Firefox in the future but I understand that doing Chrome first killed two birds with being able to get Edge on there as well.  I would like to see some more, unbias, comparisons of footage using the upscaling and one not using the upscaling (I did some comparisons using Edge and Firefox and noticed slight differences where Upscaled Edge looked better but I'm not expert)

 

It's interesting to think about using this on Netflix or Floatplane where you'd normally pay for a 4K tier and I'd be interested to see some testing done to see differences.

 

Let me know what you guys think of this, maybe I'm overhyping something that is just more of the same from Nvidia.

 

Sources

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/atomic-heart-dlss-3-the-finals-closed-beta-game-ready-driver/#rtx-video-super-resolution

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5448

Edited March 1, 2023 by Haaselh0ff
added FAQ for Video Super Resolution

[porina]

Before anyone asks about Turing (20 series) they're working on it. Apparently 30/40 series are close enough they can release first, but 20 will need different code.

 

Did some brief testing on my 3070 earlier.

360p YouTube of real world content (possibly VHS source) upscale to 720p looked like it had a sharpen filter on it but it also enhanced artefacts

1080p YouTube of real world content upscale to 1440p - no obvious difference

1080p Twitch gameplay upscale to 1440p - Higher contrast and fine detail UI elements looked much better, like native rendering. Hard to tell if fast moving content changed much if at all.

 

The video filter seems to take effect if you toggle the checkbox even if you don't hit "Apply", so you can easily turn it on and off to see the difference in real time. You still have to hit "Apply" to save it. I can't say I noticed any difference between Quality setting 1 and 4 in the testing so far. GPU power consumption (TBP) playing a video was low 20W with it off, around 40W with it on. No major increases in activity visible in GPU-Z.

[Birblover12]

Maybe it's just me, but I just tried it with my RTX 3050 on my 1080P display and it seemed to actually be worse then native 1080P content. Is this meant to happen? I tested it with the same video, and even on "Level 4 Quality" it just seems to make everything slightly blurrier. Water seems to be crisper, but otherwise no noticeable difference.

 

It sounds like it's mainly designed for someone with an HDR display (1440P for example) and is watching 1080p content and wants to have a similar experience to native resolution. Is this the case? I thought generally with Nvidia's upscaling tech is that if you're playing a game for example, and you're already at the native res of your monitor, then it will "sharpen" things further, so I assumed that'd be the case here too.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Haaselh0ff said:

 

 

It's interesting to think about using this on Netflix or Floatplane where you'd normally pay for a 4K tier and I'd be interested to see some testing done to see differences.

 

Let me know what you guys think of this, maybe I'm overhyping something that is just more of the same from Nvidia.

 

I would probably recommend not turning on this feature if you stream. Since it will consume resources on the GPU playing the video, and since the GPU already has enough on it's plate with encoding, it would probably result in shaving large amounts of GPU performance off on lower-tier cards to go from something small to something large.

 

But more to the point, this might get mis-applied, so if it was turned on by default, people might start complaining about video quality on things on their PC in the same way people complain about it on SmartTV's. 

[porina]

9 hours ago, Birblover12 said:

It sounds like it's mainly designed for someone with an HDR display (1440P for example) and is watching 1080p content and wants to have a similar experience to native resolution. Is this the case? I thought generally with Nvidia's upscaling tech is that if you're playing a game for example, and you're already at the native res of your monitor, then it will "sharpen" things further, so I assumed that'd be the case here too.

In their FAQ they say it only works if upscaling, and all other requirements are met. It should do nothing if you're playing at native. In my limited testing it does improve some 1080p content when viewed full screen at 1440p.

 

9 hours ago, Kisai said:

I would probably recommend not turning on this feature if you stream. Since it will consume resources on the GPU playing the video, and since the GPU already has enough on it's plate with encoding, it would probably result in shaving large amounts of GPU performance off on lower-tier cards to go from something small to something large.

If you're gaming + streaming this isn't doing anything. It only takes effect if you're watching video playback. Ok, you're doing a reaction stream to a video. Probably not going to impact it either. The scaler uses the tensor cores. Streaming with GPU uses the video encoders. Separate blocks.

 

Maybe if you're using DLSS and watching a video with this on at the same time there may be a potentially significant performance impact.

 

Edit: I forgot the case where you monitor your own stream on the streaming system, so it could use tensor core resource while gaming/streaming if your monitoring video is upscaled and all other conditions are met. It may use up some of the overall GPU power budget and in power limited scenarios may reduce performance of gameplay. I still wouldn't expect it to materially affect video encoding.

[williamcll]

Why not the 20 series? They have tensor too.

[mononymous]

11 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Why not the 20 series? They have tensor too.

Not yet optimized for 20 series, it will come in due time. 

Quote

 

Q: Why aren’t GeForce RTX 20 Series GPUs supported at launch?
A: Ada and Ampere architectures are built on a similar foundation for AI compute and improves on our first generation (RTX 20 series).   Many of the algorithms for RTX Video Super Resolution need to be refactored for these 20 series  GPUs

 

Q: When will RTX 20 Series GPUs add support?
A: Turing support is coming in the future. We’re not ready to put a timeframe for when the Turing engineering work will be completed, but will provide an update when a future driver adds support for Turing generation GPUs.

 

Source: https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5448

[WereCat]

I would love to try this but NVIDIA seems to not be able to release driver without issues that were fixed multiple times in the past...

[DuckDodgers]

11 hours ago, porina said:

Did some brief testing on my 3070 earlier.

360p YouTube of real world content (possibly VHS source) upscale to 720p looked like it had a sharpen filter on it but it also enhanced artefacts

1080p YouTube of real world content upscale to 1440p - no obvious difference

1080p Twitch gameplay upscale to 1440p - Higher contrast and fine detail UI elements looked much better, like native rendering. Hard to tell if fast moving content changed much if at all.

Looks like this feature was primary tuned to enhance gameplay video content (as a main target market), but it's still a work in progress and will definitely improve over time, similar to how DLSS evolved. 

[porina]

7 minutes ago, DuckDodgers said:

Looks like this feature was primary tuned to enhance gameplay video content (as a main target market), but it's still a work in progress and will definitely improve over time, similar to how DLSS evolved. 

I'll let the more established tech reviewers pixel peep in due course and report back. My suspicion is that it look more visible in areas where any upscaler struggles with already, as easy content don't really need it as much. Before I upgraded GPU to a 3070 I had to find ways to get decent performance on a 4k TV. In short, I found that the more photorealistic the content is, the less the scaling matters. IRL content doesn't often have very hard or fine high contrast areas. It's relatively smooth, and it doesn't show up badly with upscaling. Intricate high detail areas, that we more often see in some gaming content, doesn't scale well because it is made more obvious what is going on. That's where it does better than simpler scaling.

[DuckDodgers]

Detailed evaluation from COMPUTERBASE: https://www.computerbase.de/2023-02/rtx-video-super-resolution-test/

 

MPC VideoRenderer (DirectShow filter) now with NVIDIA RTX SuperRes support: https://github.com/emoose/VideoRenderer/releases/tag/rtx-1.0

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, porina said:

It only takes effect if you're watching video playback

does it also work for say, windows media player or only some browsers? 

 

[porina]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

does it also work for say, windows media player or only some browsers? 

Read the FAQ, it's 2nd link in OP. In short, it is only officially supported with recent versions of Chrome and Edge as they have the hooks in place. It may expand to other software in future.

[da na]

Interesting, I'll see if it works on my A4500.

[Stahlmann]

Just wait until every streaming service introduces some kind of block to keep selling their 4K tiers. Just like most of them block VPN connections nowadays.

 

But i'm genuinely excited and didn't even know this was in development. Gonna try it out as soon as i get home today!

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, WereCat said:

I would love to try this but NVIDIA seems to not be able to release driver without issues that were fixed multiple times in the past...

yeah, tbh there are always issues though,  the whole hdr thing just doesn't work properly at all , i remember it did work just fine a year ago or so ... 

 

36 minutes ago, porina said:

Read the FAQ, it's 2nd link in OP. In short, it is only officially supported with recent versions of Chrome and Edge as they have the hooks in place. It may expand to other software in future.

hmm, i see,  kinda uninteresting feature for me then, would be super useful for mediaplayer however. 

 

4 hours ago, DuckDodgers said:

MPC VideoRenderer (DirectShow filter) now with NVIDIA RTX SuperRes support: https://github.com/emoose/VideoRenderer/releases/tag/rtx-1.0

what's that?

[porina]

27 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

Just wait until every streaming service introduces some kind of block to keep selling their 4K tiers. Just like most of them block VPN connections nowadays.

From the FAQ:

Quote

Video we have identified as not supported includes some DRM protected content, YouTube shorts, and HDR content.

I don't know how VSR works but I could speculate the video can't be accessed for enhancement if the DRM chain is present. Basically it is decoded for output some some point after it can no longer be read and modified, to prevent ripping content.

 

Edit: having said that, the next FAQ was:

Quote

Q: What content will benefit from RTX Video Super Resolution?
A:  Over 90% of all internet video is 1080p or less. Customers with 1440p or 4k panels will see a benefit for almost all internet video. Subscription services like Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, HBO MAX mostly max out at 1080p video on PCs and can be enhanced with RTX Video Super Resolution.. 

 

27 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

But i'm genuinely excited and didn't even know this was in development. Gonna try it out as soon as i get home today!

They did announce it a little while back. I forget what the event was. Might have been one of the 40 series announcements.

[Stahlmann]

6 minutes ago, porina said:

Video we have identified as not supported includes some DRM protected content, YouTube shorts, and HDR content.

Dang, no HDR support is a bummer. I hope they can fix it with future updates. I guess with DRM protected content they mean HDCP? That basically means all streaming services are already protected.

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, porina said:

 

 

If you're gaming + streaming this isn't doing anything. It only takes effect if you're watching video playback. Ok, you're doing a reaction stream to a video. Probably not going to impact it either. The scaler uses the tensor cores. Streaming with GPU uses the video encoders. Separate blocks.

You underestimate the amount of "RTX" features people can use.

 

Pretty much, ANY "RTX" feature turned on in one program renders capacity of that hardware block reduced or eliminated in another.

 

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/broadcasting/broadcast-app/

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/nvidia-rtx-voice-setup-guide/

 

Because this feature is activated at the driver level, it can have unintended consequences for the "browser" layers at a later date, as well as things like VDO Ninja and Discord.

 

10 hours ago, porina said:

Maybe if you're using DLSS and watching a video with this on at the same time there may be a potentially significant performance impact.

 

Edit: I forgot the case where you monitor your own stream on the streaming system, so it could use tensor core resource while gaming/streaming if your monitoring video is upscaled and all other conditions are met. It may use up some of the overall GPU power budget and in power limited scenarios may reduce performance of gameplay. I still wouldn't expect it to materially affect video encoding.

 

Like I make a point of running OBS on the iGPU monitor so that the preview runs on it (hardware encoding is unaffected), and since that monitor is only 1080p there's less pixels for the preview to process.

 

[porina]

32 minutes ago, Kisai said:

You underestimate the amount of "RTX" features people can use.

I did forget RTX voice. So how many are there? VSR of this thread, DLSS, DLAA, DLDSR, these last three are generally exclusive of each other. Any others? Are you including 3rd party tools too?

 

Can use doesn't mean will use. Something may break in the worst case, but how likely is that? I don't think there is a way to monitor the usage of tensor cores e.g. through GPU-Z. That could give a better picture of what we're dealing with here. RTX voice when I tried it in past seem very lightweight, so by itself seems unlikely to be a problem with VSR.

 

32 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Like I make a point of running OBS on the iGPU monitor so that the preview runs on it (hardware encoding is unaffected), and since that monitor is only 1080p there's less pixels for the preview to process.

This is a tool that could be used, and it is up to the streamer to ensure their setup does what is needed. If the stream preview with VSR on becomes problematic the workarounds could be to use an alternate browser that doesn't support it, or adjust resolutions in such a way it doesn't get activated. 2 system streaming may become more desirable.

 

Maybe this is an area for professional reviewers to look at later. How much perf impact is there if you combine this with other activities? 

[Stahlmann]

I tried it out and after playing around a minute or two i disabled video enhancement again. It makes all content look like an oil painting. It's very similar to what DLSS 1.0 did. Too bad. I hope they can improve this feature.

[HenrySalayne]

14 hours ago, porina said:

Q: What content will benefit from RTX Video Super Resolution?
A:  Over 90% of all internet video is 1080p or less. Customers with 1440p or 4k panels will see a benefit for almost all internet video. Subscription services like Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, HBO MAX mostly max out at 1080p video on PCs and can be enhanced with RTX Video Super Resolution.. 

Or in other words:

I have a 2160p monitor since 2016 and it is still not possible to stream UHD content from the majority of streaming services to computers. Even 1080p on Amazon Prime only works in the official app after ending the stream and restarting it several time or it tries to get away with 720p, UHD simply doesn't work at all.

Nvidia steps in to fix a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place. All these streaming services literally make the experience of their paying costumers as worse as possible to prevent piracy. Ironically they make piracy pretty much the only solution to watch UHD content on a computer...

 

[Stahlmann]

6 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Or in other words:

I have a 2160p monitor since 2016 and it is still not possible to stream UHD content from the majority of streaming services to computers. Even 1080p on Amazon Prime only works in the official app after ending the stream and restarting it several time or it tries to get away with 720p, UHD simply doesn't work at all.

Nvidia steps in to fix a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place. All these streaming services literally make the experience of their paying costumers as worse as possible to prevent piracy. Ironically they make piracy pretty much the only solution to watch UHD content on a computer...

Your biggest problem is probably using the wrong browser. Chrome for example doesn't support 4K streams from most services. Edge on the other hand can stream 4K from Prime, Netflix and everything else plus it also includes HDR support which most browsers still lack.

[HenrySalayne]

4 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

Your biggest problem is probably using the wrong browser. Chrome for example doesn't support 4K streams from most services. Edge on the other hand can stream 4K from Prime, Netflix and everything else plus it also includes HDR support which most browsers still lack.

Believe me, I tried every browser as well as all the apps. Nothing works and the problem seems to be my monitor is connected via DP and not HDMI. HDMI is not an option for me (60 Hz, no thank you). DP as well as my monitor fully support HDCP (the Nvidia control panel confirms this).

And from what you read on the internet (and what Nvidia is saying) it doesn't work for the majority of users. If DRM prevents you 9 out of 10 times to stream in UHD, it's obviously not working.

BTW, I have the very same problem on a laptop with the built-in 1440p display - because you cannot stream UHD to anything with the wrong resolution. Why I can force a certain resolution/bitrate and HDR on a ad supported website like Youtube but not on a payed streaming service is beyond me. Things should simply work - and if Youtube does it, everbody can.

 

[Quackers101]

dont say the upscaling works on games it knows? or in general from games and not other stuff? Also if needing a connection for the "super resolution".

Also intel released theirs for super resolution video.