- Come on, Twitch. Gimme 4K already.
(dramatic orchestral music) 20 bucks for premium.
Are you kidding me, Netflix?
(door opening)
(staircase thudding)
- Linus!
- Geez.
(moves to gentle music) - Don't do it.
RTX VSR!
Upscale!
- Uh.
- Look.
- Whoa, this is amazing.
Put away your wallets, friends.
Because with a free driver update,
NVIDIA RTX 30 and 40 series GPUs
can use AI to upscale any video
you play back in a web browser to 4K.
Even this message from our sponsor.
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(gentle music) - NVIDIA's latest
driver update, version 531.18,
showed up with a pretty cool and free feature
called "RTX Video Super Resolution", or "VSR".
Which is not to be confused with AMD's
"Virtual Super Resolution", aka "VSR".
(Linus groaning)
Using a 30 or 40-series graphics card
and a Chromium-based browser,
so it's Chrome and Edge for now,
with plug-ins expected for others down the line,
you can take streamed content with resolutions
as low as 360p and upscale them in real-time
all the way to 4K.
Now obviously, we can't just take NVIDIA's word for this.
So, we collected a library of screen capture
from a variety of genres and sent it to Mark, our editor
(text splashes) and resident upscaling nerd,
to see if he could spot the differences.
And while we wait, I am gonna try it for myself.
We've got not one, not two,
but three displays hooked up to our RTX 3050 graphics card.
We chose the 3050 because it's the least expensive card
with support for the new feature, for now.
It could conceivably come to 20-series in the future
since they also have the Tensor Cores that VSR relies on,
but I wouldn't hold my breath.
For my test, I'll be watching the same YouTube video
on my three identical screens.
But one is gonna to be YouTube's 1080p
just blown up to full screen in Firefox.
Which, if you recall, doesn't currently support VSR.
One is gonna be YouTube's 1080p upscaled to 4K with VSR.
And the last one will play at YouTube's native 4K.
Uh.
Ah, I did it again!
I'm back. I'm ready.
But we did skip something important:
Setting it up.
Once you've got the right GPU and the latest driver,
you simply enable it in the NVIDIA Control Panel.
Under "Adjust Video Image Settings",
you're gonna wanna set "RTX video enhancement" to "On",
and then quality level one is low,
with quality level four being the highest.
The community consensus is that one kind of sucks.
Two and three suck less than one, and four is pretty good.
So we've gone with four.
(gentle music continues) This is a pretty recent video.
I can already tell that this is crap.
Hm, hold on.
No, I think I was wrong.
I think that's crap.
- [David] You're not supposed to judge
the content of the video, Linus.
- Hey!
Be nice. (chuckles)
This is way harder than it should be.
Um, this is almost certainly native 4K.
That's bad, that's upscaled.
4K, 1080p, upscaled.
- [David] Yeah.
- Yes!
The truth is though, the only reason I can tell,
is that I noticed the artifacts 'cause I'm looking for them.
If I wasn't looking for them, holy crap.
Yeah, the one on the right is-
it's just less sharp, but like-
Wow, even text.
It's just sharper.
Everything is sharper.
What's most surprising to me is
how well it handles things that are
supposed to be out of focus.
Anything that's blurred in the background
with a bokeh kind of softness, still is.
That big gray wall.
There's nothing you can do about low bit rate.
Wait, I actually like the AI version
better than the native 4K one.
Come check this out.
Quick, quick, quick, quick, quick.
Oh, I meant Plouffe,
- [David] Oh. (laugh) but yeah.
- It's okay David, I thought he meant you too.
(Linus chuckles)
- You can see kind of a smeariness.
It's better than the banding.
- You're right.
- It actually looks
better.
- Wait till after Tanner.
- Look at this.
Look at this though.
- It goes along the wall. I noticed it here.
Yeah, on the plug.
- Yeah, yeah. - Um.
Yeah.
- I would probably want to apply this filter
to native 4K content.
Just low bit rate content.
- You could.
- Well, no you can't.
That's the thing.
And you actually can't even check
whether it's running or not.
- You kind of can.
In the meantime,
let's try something a little bit more challenging.
1080p looks fine enough.
It doesn't really need to be upscaled.
NCIX number 20.
- Yeah, you look so cold.
- I noticed that he didn't say cool.
- It's 'cause you don't have a beard yet.
- (chuckles) Yeah, not biased at all.
Look how much sharper that license plate is.
That's pretty cool.
Obviously it's not making this text readable.
But whether I can read it or not,
it's not as noticeably just a blurry mess.
Actually, is it more readable?
Holy crap, it is.
This guy is good.
He's got a promising career ahead of him.
I don't think it's working right now.
- You don't think so?
- No. - Here, we can check.
- I'm 99% sure it's not working.
- Oh, so it's the 3050,
so we're not gonna see a power spike,
so we actually need to go to GPU usage.
- Well, we should see some power.
- It, like, barely cha-
It almost doesn't change on the 3050.
The 3070 and the 3080 we're hitting like 90% usage, right?
Oh, it's using the 3D.
- Barely, though.
- But it's also- - Wait, it looks better now.
See this license plate is actually like "clarity-ized", now.
The skin smoothing- - Yeah.
- is not always natural,
especially with more challenging source material like this.
But the box, this cable- - Look at the rubber grommets.
- Definitely cleaned up.
No, it's working.
Look at the keyboard too.
Way sharper on the right. - Oh yeah, the mouse?
This looks like a blurry blob.
That looks like an actual mouse.
- Yeah.
- I notice it mostly on the license plate and then
on the water droplets. - Look at the car.
- Looks way cleaner, right?
- You're right. The headlights too.
- Yeah, it's definitely working on the 3050.
- Yeah. - I just, I don't (bleep)
know what's with the power.
- [David] Are we gonna get a bunch of videos done this week?
- We're gonna get eight, but we're not gonna get nine.
- Yeah. I don't think that was realistic.
- Yeah. Script review went a little long.
We were playing around with VSR too much.
- That was work!
- It was work.
- [David] It's that cool, hey?
- It's that cool.
- It's really cool.
What about non-YouTube though?
- Right.
- Theoretically this should work
on anything streaming through a Chromium web browser,
but that raises a lot of questions.
What about Plex?
What about DRM-protected content, like Netflix?
Uh, I don't know. (laughs)
I have premiums, so I had to create
a new Netflix account in order to test this.
But, once I did, and I was streaming at 720p,
the difference is, well, in Seinfeld not that noticeable,
because David, yes.
As you pointed out when we were talking off camera,
it's already been digitally enhanced.
So what we found is that
it doesn't really seem to do anything.
You know, I'm noticing it more now, Plouffe.
The film grain is kind of like
coming in and out of existence.
- That's what was happening with Malcolm in the Middle.
- Yeah, that's really unfortunate.
- It just doesn't know how to handle it,
because it thinks it's-
I'm pretty sure it thinks it's an object.
And it's like, "Oh, I gotta sharpen that object."
- Yeah. - But no, it's film grain.
It should be trying to denoise.
- Or it could think that it's blocking-
- True. - and it's trying to
smooth it.
- True.
- Yeah.
Quite undesirable.
But if we take something relatively new
that's just running at a lower resolution, holy crap.
720p up to 4K, this looks incredible.
If you told me this was 720p, I would tell you to piss off.
- You can see it though.
When the van was just going past there,
there was a bunch of smearing
on the very tail end of the Winnebago.
- I wouldn't notice it if I was just
watching the video, though.
- Especially from a little-
Oh, and the grass there.
It was getting confused with
the smoke and the grass in front.
But- - Yeah, when I'm looking
for it, man, I can see it.
- Yeah.
- Obviously, if we pause it, we're gonna find problems.
But in motion, look at the calculator watch!
- Yeah, just all the tree branches
and stuff. - It's sharp!
Ooh.
Yikes.
That wobble air on the badge.
It does look sharper than it should,
but it's clearly getting confused.
Yeah, look at Smithers wobbling around here.
- Some of the lines also get a little too thin or thick
on the cell shading,
'cause it doesn't know what to do with it.
- Yeah.
- That's what I think, anyway.
It doesn't know what to do, so.
Even though, look at the money.
- The money, flickering.
And we can A/B test this easily
by just opening up the control panel
and then turning it off and hitting apply to-
- There's still some wobble.
It might just be the animation when like the frames,
'cause it's all on moving stuff, right?
And so they're gonna- - Actually, yeah.
- have to do the frame and everything.
- You just have really, no that's,
that's in the original video.
- Yeah.
- Oh!
- I don't think it does much for Simpsons.
I think it's too simple of a cartoon.
It's really, you know, solid colors and blocks, right?
People were reporting that older animes were
looking a lot sharper and cleaner.
But I haven't checked anything out yet.
- I'm going down to 480p, I just wanna see this.
This movie has such a unique animation style.
I want to see how it handles it.
Honestly though, I would take this over not upscaled.
I like this back, this back wall here and stuff.
Okay, now we go back 20 seconds.
- It's still kind of bad.
- It's pretty bad.
It's better, but we're pushing
the absolute limits of what it can do.
This is an extremely challenging scenario,
just because of the way the shading is done in this movie.
The way the textures kind of naturally look
blocky in a lot of cases.
I would definitely just have this on all the time
if I watched stuff like this.
- You think so?
- Yeah.
- Even with your 4K monitor
with your high internet bandwidth and no cap?
- Well, no well yeah, but sometimes it's down
to what content is available.
- That's true. - If you're watching
older shows that are simply not available in 4K
or even 1080. - Yep.
- I'd want it on.
There's definitely some artifacting,
particularly around edges or
in between and around fast moving objects and text.
But it works and it does so in real-time.
Shockingly well. So how does it work?
I mentioned RTX Tensor Cores before.
These are machine learning specialized hardware blocks.
They're actually the same ones that NVIDIA uses
for their DLSS game upscaling technology.
But instead of making your game look sharper,
they're using them to remove blocky compression artifacts
while upscaling video content, like DLSS.
Each frame gets analyzed and then checked
against NVIDIA's deep learning network,
which has been trained on a wide variety of content.
Then rendered the way the machine thinks it should be.
Unlike DLSS, this is solely using
the lower resolution video frame
as its input data and it only works on video content.
So there's no motion vectors or depth buffers to work with.
No game engine data, nothing.
And they wanna make it very clear
that VSR is using a completely different algorithm.
Really it's a lot more like video enhance AI
from Topaz Labs, an upscaler that we've used before.
Except, instead of selecting from a
bunch of presets and changing values
depending on how aggressive you want the upscaler to be,
you're left with a simple on/off switch
and then an opaque quality dropdown.
Video upscaling typically works
by using an interpolation algorithm to make
up the empty space that would be left
if we upscaled a 1080p frame, which is roughly
2 million pixels to a 4K frame, which is over 8 million.
Those extra pixels, they don't just
automatically get filled in.
Whether it's the display, your computer
or a media playback device like a Blu-ray player
or the NVIDIA Shield, something needs to first
analyze the signal source resolution.
Then hopefully apply noise reduction followed
by edge and texture sharpening to produce a clearer image.
The way deep learning changes this approach
involves using algorithms that analyze video qualities
like line, light, and color.
It is constantly learning and improving the more
that it's used to create a more correct final frame
with fewer mistakes and artifacts.
So, it will look at an image and detect blurry objects.
Then try to guess what the objects are,
and if they're supposed to be blurry or not,
and fill in the missing pixels.
We saw this firsthand with DLSS 1.0.
It worked, but it looked pretty awful
in scenarios that had lots
of little lines close together like chain link fences.
Since then, DLSS has massively improved.
And I am hoping that we will see something similar here.
Just like I'm hoping to see some
of our new desk pads hitting your desks
the next time we inevitably roast your setups.
lttsore.com
This tech is exciting for the reasons
we've shown you already.
Like, saving money on a 4K Netflix subscription.
But, also for some less obvious ones.
Twitch, for example, does not offer any way to broadcast
or view in 4K, but we found that VSR
does an amazing job of sharpening up the image.
Whether it's just great technology
or NVIDIA's gaming heritage showing here, we're not sure.
But the bottom line is that it works really well.
Even those ads looked better.
There's other use cases too. What about
rural users who might even have a library
of premium, high resolution content
but are concerned about bandwidth use?
Older content is another area where VSR shines or doesn't.
Broadly speaking, the community is loving the effect
on streams of older standard deaf anime.
But we fired up some Malcolm in the Middle
which looks like it was shot on 16mm film.
And NVIDIA's current upscaling solution doesn't
seem to play nicely with all the film grain.
It's shockingly bad. Even though our source is 1080p,
it manages to look worse when we upscale to 4K.
Similarly, when we were upscaling The Simpsons,
it seems to get a little confused by the cell shading
and I would say at best results in no real improvement.
So what's the drawback?
Nothing's ever free, right?
Well, while our RTX 3050 seems content
with upscaling at a similar wattage
to what it uses while just playing back video, the RTX 3080
in my workstation that we used when we were
reviewing the script was a completely different story.
Upscaling 720p Netflix, I saw anywhere
from 80 to 120 watts of power usage.
But upscaling 1080p 60fps Twitch like this
saw my power settle in at over 300 watts on the GPU alone.
That was without an obvious difference
in upscaling quality compared to this 3050.
Unfortunately, for many people around the world then,
that's a trade-off they might not be willing to make.
Not everyone seems to be seeing the same high power
consumption, but we can only report on what we observe.
And that means that if you have the
same kind of power consumption we do,
and you have a high end gaming PC,
if you watch just four hours a day of upscaled content
that could cost you $230 a year in the UK.
The EU average is just 25 cents per kilowatt hour right now
which will cut that number in half.
But some countries like Germany are right alongside the UK.
I mean, at that point you might as well just pay
for the premium subscription.
It's nearly as energy intensive as mining, except
this time there's no cash reward to offset the power usage.
When we monitor the GPU usage of the card though,
we can see why it's happening.
Rather than taxing the GPU's video decoding block,
it's actually hitting the 3D rendering hardware.
That means that if you're a multitasker and you like to
have a Twitch stream up on your second monitor
while you are gaming, VSR is gonna have a significant impact
on your actual gaming performance.
The good news is that depending on the resolution
of your secondary monitor, VSR is
unlikely to be active at all times.
NVIDIA can detect both the quality of the source file,
and the window size of the player.
What that means is VSR is only turned on
where it's warranted.
And you can see this with our GPU usage.
As I go from windowed mode to, (Linus singing)
full-screen mode. It's not perfect. At the moment,
it works about as well as if you upscale the video file
with the Artemis preset in video enhance AI.
But that's not real-time and it's something
that you have to premeditate, right?
So this is pretty sick, but you can expect
a lot of blur around boxes of text.
People can look a little too soft or too plastic-y,
and trying to upscale from lower resolutions is still
like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
But for our first try, technically second, if you count the
NVIDIA Shield Pro, it does a pretty good job
and I am thoroughly impressed.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to check
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It didn't go that well.