NVIDIA RTX-powered laptops will upscale all your videos to 4K

NVIDIA GeForce-equipped laptops for long have been hailed as some of the best machines there are for gaming. However, these machines are equally adept at video and photo editing, armed with a host of AI features.  

That’s not all though. When it comes to entertainment, though GeForce GPUs have not just content creation, but content consumption taken care of as well. That’s because RTX GPUs can upscale content from 1080p to a 4K resolution, using artifical intelligence.

Intrigued? Meet RTX Video Super Resolution, or NVIDIA RTX VSR technology. Here’s everything you need to know.  

As per an NVIDIA report, video streaming accounts for nearly 80 per cent of our internet consumption today. And most of this content streams at 1080p or lower. This includes streaming websites such as YouTube, as well OTT platforms such as Netflix and Disney+Hotstar.  

NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution: What it does

Say your laptop display supports a resolution higher than 1080p though. Yes, we’re talking about 4K videos. To actually enjoy the content in 4K resolution, your browser must be able to upscale this content from a 1080p resolution. That is, improve its quality beyond what it was originally. While they can do it, they do so using very basic tech, which results in the images on your screen appearing blurry.  

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NVIDIA RTX VSR though, which supports RTX 30 and 40 series GPUs currently, harnesses AI and upscales this content to match your 4K display’s resolution, thereby letting you fully tap into its potential.  

NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution: How it works

How it does this, is using a deep learning network that performs upscaling and compression artifact reduction. A compression artifact, in simple terms, refers to a distortion of the images you see on your screen. 

The network conducts an analysis of lower-resolution videos and compresses them. It removes any distortions around the edges, corrects any high-frequency details being washed out, and reduces lost texture quality. It also sharpens the edges around subjects, as well as the details on them, and predicts the residual image at the target resolution.  

Residual images are referred to as the differences which are left out before and after image modification. These residual images are then simply superimposed on top of the new image, thereby helping upscale the content to a 4K resolution. 

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The deep learning network on the chipsets has been trained on several different types of content with various compression levels and learns about all the different types of compression artifacts that appear in a low-resolution video. Evaluation of these artifacts then helps NVIDIA RTX VSR effectively upscale all your favourite movies and TV shows (and not to mention, games) to a 4K resolution. 

How to access and enable NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution

NVIDIA RTX VSR, as mentioned above, requires a GeForce RTX 40 or 30 Series GPU. It works on nearly all sorts of content streamed on Google Chrome as well as Microsoft Edge.  

To actually access the feature, update your GPU to the latest available GeForce Game Ready Driver, and also update Google Chrome to version 110.0.5481.105 or above, and Microsoft Edge to version 110.0.1587.56 and above.  

Once this is done, to enable NVIDIA RTX VSR on your laptop, launch the NVIDIA Control Panel app, and tap on “Adjust video image settings.” Hit the checkbox that says super-resolution, under “RTX video enhancement” and select a quality between one and four. These numbers represent which level your content can be upscaled to when streaming. 

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NVIDIA’s NVIDIA RTX VSR technology helps elevate your viewing on our laptops to the next level, allowing for a truly cinematic experience right on your desks. Or perhaps on your next long-haul flight. And it goes to show just another reason an RTX-powered laptop makes for a great investment, which ensures all your work, as well as leisure, is well taken of.