Most of us first noticed GPU scaling in games because of the sharper edges, sharper image quality, and of course, “free” performance. Features like DLSS and FSR have made scaling magical, powered by dedicated hardware like tensor cores that reconstruct details faster than brute force rendering ever did.
The scaling capabilities of our GPUs are not limited to games and their internal resolutions, however. The same GPUs we bought for frame rates also clean up the rest of our screen time, and once you start using upscaling on a daily basis, even outside of gaming, it’s virtually impossible to go back.
Stop calling it AI slop: scaling democratizes high-end gaming for the 99%
Better visuals for those who are not tech savvy.
Virtual Super Resolution is a miracle worker for old videos
480p is the new 1080p
We may all have upgraded to sharper screens years ago, but that doesn’t mean the content we grew up consuming has caught up. A 1440p or 4K panel just makes compressing online videos that much more obvious. In fact, it’s especially egregious when you’re trying to rewatch old TV shows from the days when 480p was the standard. Anything that hasn’t been remastered looks pretty awful on our screens, with blotchy textures and a weird softness to anything below native resolution. Even “Full HD” videos on YouTube and Twitch streams are aggressively compressed for smoother streaming, and our expensive monitors end up exposing every blemish on screen.
This is where RTX Video Super Resolution and AMD Video Super Resolution enter the chat. Running directly through supported browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, VSR upscales low-resolution video in real time using your GPU. The result is of course not native 4K, but it is certainly much cleaner, more stable and far less distracting. Nvidia leans more into reconstruction, smoothing out artifacts and refining details more aggressively. On the other hand, AMD users report that their cards’ VSR approach is lighter and more conservative. Either way, the effect is immediate. Old videos instantly become more beautiful to watch: cleaner and sharper.
I tried playing at 360p with DLSS 4.5 and the results shocked me
Night City at 360p is remarkable to say the least
VSR is available for any Nvidia RTX GPU
Those who own any RTX card can activate it in seconds
On paper, both implementations of Virtual Super Resolution on AMD and Nvidia GPUs solve the same problem. They take low quality videos and dramatically improve them with GPU acceleration. In practice, however, they land differently. RTX VSR looks like a feature you actively notice. It offers multiple levels of quality, relies heavily on AI reconstruction, and even makes sure you know you’re using it with an “RTX VSR” logo plastered over all video playback in your browser (you can turn it off, though). Even the crudest streams can look surprisingly refined when using RTX VSR, although in my experience increasing the strength of the super resolution or putting the GPU priority to “high” tends to take things into motion smoothing or “soap opera effect” territory.
To use VSR in your local browser, make sure hardware acceleration is enabled in the browser settings.
Enabling RTX VSR for Nvidia users is a pretty simple affair. As long as you have an RTX graphics card (20 series or higher), all you have to do is open the Nvidia app and go to the system settings. Next, head to the Video tab and you will easily spot the super resolution there. Turn it on and leave the quality on Auto or Manual. Choosing Manual gives you much more control over how VSR upgrades video playback in your browser, or even your local media player.
Native 4K was supposed to be the end game, but upscaling was a game changer.
What’s the point when upscaled 4K is almost as good?
AMD’s VSR implementation is more subtle
It’s still effective in its own way
On the other hand, AMD Video Super Resolution, enabled via the Adrenalin app, takes a more subtle route. It refines, stabilizes and improves clarity without going too far into “over-processed” territory. AMD users have reported online that their version of VSR seems less “transformative” compared to what they see Nvidia GPU users posting, especially when it comes to heavily compressed content. Neither Team Red nor Team Green’s approach to super resolution is “wrong” per se. They’re just tuned differently, but the important thing here is that AMD and Nvidia users can still put their GPUs’ AI cores to good use to even improve their video playback, especially when the video source isn’t at native resolution.
AMD’s VSR is only available on RX 5000, 6000, 7000, and 9000 series GPUs.
Having used RTX VSR every day for the past couple of years, I’ve found that the one place it performs most effectively is watching anime or cartoons. When it comes to anime, VSR truly feels like a magical upscaler working in real time to make characters and on-screen effects look remarkably better and sharper than they are. In fact, half of my collection (or my backlog, if you will) is 480p and 720p content archived over several years, all of which benefit enormously from the real-time upscaler built into my GPU.
We’ve reached the GPU ceiling, and AI tricks like DLSS allow companies to pretend we haven’t.
Silicon alone can’t do much without software carrying the load
Your GPU evolves much more than your games Using our GPUs to play the latest games only scratches the surface.
The most interesting thing about all of this is not the technology itself, but rather the ease with which it integrates into everyday life and becomes invisible. There may be no benchmark to validate VSR and its “effectiveness”, but the difference is night and day for anyone using it on old video footage or just low resolution video.
We love how our GPUs let us play the latest and greatest games, but that’s only scratching the surface. Whether it’s upscaling, using AI cores to accelerate machine learning, or just keeping the PC running smoothly, the GPU ensures that everything on the screen is pleasing to the eye.