Nvidia Video Super Resolution (which will be shortened to VSR for the rest of this video)
currently allows users of Geforce RTX 3000 and 4000 cards enhance videos viewed on Chrome-based
browsers. There are 4 quality settings to choose from, but I’m testing the best one in this video
because I want to give it the best chance possible to impress. What it is is sort-of upscaling,
but more about generally ‘enhancing’ how the image looks. I can sum it up as this:
it sharpens edges, and removes blobbiness. And that’s pretty much what I expected from it
before it was released. I think it’s best used for making bad-quality videos look ‘less bad’.
THIS video, for instance. Being one of my oldest and worst-looking videos, it’s my go-to
when testing new upscaling solutions. Which I do more often than I’d like to admit. And I see many
similarities between how VSR goes about this, and how the Topaz programs have in the past.
‘Argh!’
Straight off, this text looks MUCH cleaner when VSR is enabled. This has been upscaled
so nicely that it may as well be a higher resolution, so I fully expect VSR to work
miracles on simple-looking content with clear, sharp lines. Stuff like anime. To be honest,
this sort of content doesn’t excite me much as upscaling has already proven to be very capable
of ‘enhancing’ this style of image, but obviously VSR has real-world value in that it does it in
real-time, which is cool. I’m a bit scared of showing footage from animated sources, but in
this 360p comparison shot from Moomins, you can see that VSR on, it makes it appear like a much
higher resolution image. This is great news for people on limited internet connections, because
it means you could get 720p-quality results while only using 360p’s worth of bandwidth.
I know there are ways of getting VSR working on video players too, so those of you who
like compressing your collection of cartoons down to super-small filesizes can rejoice,
knowing that if you play them back with VSR enabled then it will do an excellent job at
reclaiming any degraded image clarity. I also got this high-quality 1080p shot,
just to see what VSR could do to an already-good looking anime-style image. And of course,
VSR sharpens it further. Its benefits can only really be seen once I zoom in,
where you can see it’s done an excellent job of tidying up the lines. And while no new details
have been ADDED, it’s done a great job of making existing details appear clearer. Especially on
these cables overhead, in some places it looks like VSR has conjured these out of nowhere! But
they were in the original image as well. Just very blurred. Whether every detail on the image
SHOULD be unblurred is another question though. But I don’t think VSR is quite so important when
the source material already looks decent. It could help to keep the quality looking good
on a large 4 or 8K TV, perhaps, but I think VSR’s main strengths are more noticeable when
it’s trying to restore a bad quality video. Speaking of which, let’s return back to the
Morrowind example. It’s very hard to know how to show the effect of VSR- showing the videos side
by side like this would be the obvious way, but there’s going to be some degree of image
degradation on Youtube. But if you’re viewing this video in 4K then the quality should be
good enough for you to be able to pause and to compare the images side-by-side. I will be using
still images to highlight differences simply for those of you who can’t play this video in
the best quality possible, or for those of you who would rather just hear me talk about it.
But this gameplay style of video is more the kind that I’m interested in seeing it enhance,
because there’s a lot wrong with it and probably no ‘right’ way of improving it. Because this video
is such a pixellated mess! And probably more like the sorts of low-quality streams that will rely on
VSR to make look presentable again! And VSR does some things to this kind of video that are worth
noting. The HUD elements like these bars down here look sharper with it on. It’s clearing up
all the jpeg’d looking outlines around stuff, and it does a modest -but welcome- job of enhancing
how this part of the picture looks. The mountain changes colour a bit,
and this is one of the more interesting quirks that I’ve found with VSR. I don’t know if this
colour-change is always intentional, but in this instance, it hides the subtle green and
blue hues which I think only existed in the first place because of the very low video quality. But
this quirk is definitely something to keep an eye on, because I’m not sure it’s always beneficial.
Though I think it is in this particular instance. You probably also noticed faint browny artifacts
around the edges of the screen when only the text was being shown. This is likely
another unwelcome by-product of the algorithms that Nvidia’s using. Now this sort of thing is
rather discrete in practice, but you really don’t want stuff like this ruining a dark shot, do you.
So it’s hopefully something that they can iron out in later iterations.
As for the gameplay itself… wow. It looks markedly BETTER with VSR on. The mountain’s texture looks
higher-res and more consistent, the outline of the mountain looks higher-res, and the snow remains
mostly in-tact, while the blocky pixellated nature of the background clouds is smoothed
out. And that’s a big achievement- falling snow has been a nightmare for other upscalers
to attempt in the past. I’ve seen some add MORE snowflakes to the scene than there actually are,
while others remove them almost entirely. And while Nvidia’s VSR may remove some of
the less obvious snowflakes, in my opinion it does a great job of differentiating between
what’s a snowflake that it needs to show, and what’s just an artifact that it needs to hide.
There may be instances you’ll find where it will conceal more subtle particle effects,
but for the most-part it’s one of the better upscalers out there for this sort of thing.
And looking at the sky, it does an amazing job of smoothing out the colour gradients. It goes from
looking like a blocky, low bitrate mess to looking like how a sky should look. You can also see this
in the transitions between clips, and even moreso in the mine sequence where it’s much darker and
where the blockiness becomes even more of a problem. If I show you some before and afters,
I think most of you will agree that the ‘after’ looks significantly better. It adds a dappled
look to the image, which isn’t ‘extra’ detail, but it does give the impression of it. Sort of
like adding grain to a movie file. This tricks our eyes into thinking it’s displaying more
detail than what’s really there. I guess because it no longer looks like a low bitrate file. But
the million-dollar question is whether or not VSR brings relevant details forward and back
from other moments of the same clip, which would be like the holy grail of upscaling technology.
But I don’t think it does. It’s just very good at making out shapes from a low-quality image.
In the original preview of this tech, they showed it constructing clear stairs from a blurry source.
Well, I’ve got my own example of it here! And rather than drawing stairs where there weren’t
any before, it actually goes the other way by blurring some bits which USED to contain stairs
of some sort. Maybe that’s because it’s identified this as a very low-quality where it’s best to
err on the side of caution, but it’s good to establish that it isn’t performing miracles here.
Just a very good job.
And lastly, a low-resolution fly-by through this town. Here it’s content simply sharpening stuff
up a bit and to reduce the blockiness. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not being too
ambitious with its upscaling here. You can still see the pixelation around the edges of
things because I was playing this game without any antialiasing at the time. I might have got
better results from this upscaling had the footage been anti-aliased in the first place.
Because the text you see IS anti-aliased, and because of that has been made super
crisp and sharp by the VSR. But the question to ask is:
do I think it looks better than it did before? To which the answer is most definitely ‘YES’. I
am impressed by how much of a difference the technology dares to make, without going far
enough to introduce artifacts that are obvious enough to give away that it’s been upscaled.
And that is the difficult balance to strike. I have decided to split my analysis in half and to
end the video here. Because it’s become a bit of a self-deprecating joke of mine at this point where
I look at my previous upscaling videos, decide that they’re too long and complicated, and promise
myself that the next one I make will be shorter and simpler… only for it then to eventually
become the longest and most complicated upscaling video yet! I’m an addict. What do you expect.
So that’s it for now. But just know that I was right on the money with the video
I made predicting what VSR would be like. It isn’t attempting anything new, it isn’t magic,
it’s just doing the best BALANCE of it yet, and in REALTIME. THAT’S the killer feature right there!
Because it helps the feature to transcend beyond enthusiast usage, and into the everyday world of
people just wanting their videos to look nicer. Provided they have a cutting-edge graphics card.
I want to touch on other things, like how it deals with better-looking videos,
real life footage, the image quality and power consumption at different presets
and so on. But as you can imagine, doing all this would result in my
longest and most complicated upscaling video yet. And I don’t want to do that.
Again.
So for now: just know that it’s an excellently calibrated upscaler that may not always add as
much detail as it COULD, but it adds as much as it can without adding distracting artifacts. That’s
impressive. Because it’s always tempting with upscaling to push it too far, which is fun for
the person upscaling the video, but not so much for the people who have to watch the end result.
Check out my preview video about this here where, as usual,
I predicted everything about this perfectly. Or this one where I interview an AI before
ChatGPT came out and it became cool to do so, which is probably why this
video doesn’t have many views either. Or this one, from several years ago,
where I predict a future where you can upscale waifus in real-time. That dream is now a reality.