Nvidia made waves recently by launching RTX Video Super Resolution (VSR) for Chromium browsers. It can upscale low-resolution video content using the tensor cores built into Ampere and Ada Lovelace GPUs. For example, it can upscale a 1080p video stream to 4K, which is excellent for those with high-res panels on their desks. Nvidia says 90% of the video streamed today is at 1080p or lower, so this is useful technology. When Nvidia announced RTX VSR, we immediately wondered if AMD would attempt something similar. However, Intel has beaten AMD to the punch. It’s already possible with some Intel GPUs, both discrete and integrated.
News of Intel’s support for this feature is unofficial; however, users are reporting it works. According to Videocardz, it’s supported on iGPUs going back to Intel’s 10th Gen (Skylake) and newer CPUs. It also works on Arc graphics cards as well. To get it functioning, you must add a line to Chrome’s “target” line in settings: –enable-features=IntelVpSuperResolution. You also need to run at least Chrome 109, an older version. Nvidia requires at least Chrome version 110, which is the most current–or the latest version of Edge and its newest graphics driver.
Intel VSR on versus off shows a dramatic increase in sharpness. (Image: DCinside)
Although this is a “free” feature, assuming you have the proper hardware, you might not want to use it. In the same Chromium bug report mentioned above, an Intel employee says it consumes a lot of power. The post from April 2022 says, “The video processors in new generations of Intel GPUs(Gen9+) can support AI-based super-resolution, which can significantly improve video quality for online education, video conference, and gaming scenarios. This would be a great improvement in user experiment [sic]. The downside is that it would consume much more GPU resources and power. So we’d better turn it on where the external power supply is available.”
Along those lines, one Twitter user noted in reply to the original post that their laptop sounded like a jet engine after enabling it. Therefore, it might be best left to hose with Arc discrete GPUs for now. Still, it’s worth looking into if you have a supported Intel iGPU. Videocardz says they couldn’t get it to work with a Tiger Lake CPU, so your mileage will vary.
It’s also not officially supported by Intel either, but that might be forthcoming in a driver update. We tried Nvidia’s version when it launched recently and didn’t notice any improvement. Also, some Redditors reported using up to 200W when upscaling 1080p video to 4K. That’s a tough pill to swallow to watch a slightly sharper video.
Now Read:
- Leaked Slides Offer Details on Intel’s Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake CPUs
- Intel Announces Xeon W-Series ‘Sapphire Rapids’ CPUs for Workstations
- Intel Xeon W CPU Sneak Peek Shows It Nearing 1,000 Watts of Power Consumption
No comments:
Post a Comment