NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution tested – video upscaling on the fly

NVIDIA has just released another new feature to help differentiate its GeForce RTX graphics cards from the competition - RTX Video Super Resolution or VSR for short.

As the ‘V’ in its name suggests, VSR is designed to improve the visual quality of videos. Not all videos mind you, the first release of VSR is targeted at improving streaming video content such as YouTube, Twitch, Netflix and the like. In other words, it can’t improve the quality of locally stored videos on your PC.

What difference does RTX Video Super Resolution make?

While most web browsers provide basic video upscaling, this is by nature hardware agnostic so the results aren’t all that impressive. VSR differs by running a pretrained AI model on the Tensor cores found in GeForce RTX GPUs to increase the sharpness and enhance details such as edges and complex textures, with four levels of quality to choose between (more on this later).

We put VSR to the test using the most popular gaming GPU of recent years, a GeForce RTX 3080, and threw a variety of footage at it. Using an ultra-high-quality nature video on YouTube we performed three comparisons, native 1080p in the web browser, VSR quality 4 (the highest) and native 4K.
By its nature it’s very hard to show the quality difference between upscaled video in static images, but it’s fair to say that in motion there was a noticeable increase in sharpness with VSR enabled in this video. The most notable improvements were around the edges of the chameleon’s scales and the fungus growing on the branch. Arguably and quite surprisingly the video actually appeared clearer with VSR enabled than in native 4K too.

We then gave VSR a real challenge, some YouTube footage of an airshow the author took way back in 2015. This was shot on a smartphone at 720p so isn’t the best quality to start with. Even so, VSR did manage to improve the video quality to some extent, teasing out and enhancing more detail of the Victor tanker as it screams down the runway, with improved clarity around sharp edges such as the cockpit and air intakes. The clouds in the sky looked more real too, rather than more like woolly cotton pads from a 1960s TV show such as the Thunderbirds. Upscaling, even AI-powered, is always going to struggle with such low resolution and low bit-rate video, but VSR gave it a jolly good try. We were also pleased to see that VSR didn’t add any noticeable motion blur, something often apparent in upscaled footage that can be very distracting.

It’s worth noting that we did measure a small increase in GPU load when watching videos with VSR enabled, with an average increase of 3% and peak of 7%. While this wasn’t enough to make the fan of our RTX 3080 spin up, it is worth bearing in mind if you like watching videos while gaming as your framerate will take a bit of hit. However, it barely takes more than a few seconds to enable and disable VSR (more on this later).

How does RTX Video Super Resolution work?

As already explained VSR uses the Tensor cores to improve video quality, but how? Starting with a neural network that was trained on a multitude of images (no doubt on a DGX appliance, which Scan also sells), the network analyses each frame of the video and predicts a residual image at the desired resolution. This is then combined with a traditionally bicubic upscaled frame, increasing sharpness and removing artefacts such as banding and motion blur.

How do I enable RTX Video Super Resolution?

VSR is available for free now for anybody with a GeForce RTX 40-series GPU or GeForce RTX 30-series GPU in their gaming PC or gaming laptop. All you need to do is download and install the latest GeForce Game Ready driver which as of the article being published was 531.18. NVIDIA plans on releasing a driver for RTX Studio PCs and laptops later in March.

You’ll also need either Chrome (110.0.5481.105 or higher) or Edge (110.0.1587.56 or higher). Unfortunately, Firefox isn’t supported at launch.

Then open up the NVIDIA Control Panel, navigate to the ‘Adjust video image settings’ menu, tick the box marked ‘RTX video enhancement’ and select a quality setting from the drop-down list below and hit Apply and you’re done.