Version 110 of Chrome is about to integrate the RTX Video Super Resolution upscaling technology, supported by the RTX 30 and 40 cards.
The latest stable version of Chrome, 110.0.5481.77 precisely, includes an important new feature. We can see in its code – published publicly – that it activates by default the use of “Nvidia Super Resolution”, the new video upscaling technology presented by the graphics card manufacturer at CES 2023.
If you are an NVIDIA Shield TV user, you will be on familiar ground. It is simply a feature capable of automatically increasing the definition of a 1080p video to pass it in 4K, throughan artificial intelligence that takes care of improving the quality of the image at the same time. It joins the framework of upscaling technologies already well known in the television industry, but it now integrates directly into your web browser.
Scaling for computers
Indeed, who says Chrome says Chromium, the basis on which many web browsers are developed today. If Google Chrome is the first to integrate NVIDIA’s technology, it’s a safe bet that Microsoft Edge and Opera are also in the game in the following days.
There are, however, several limitations. Already, RTX Video Super Resolution technology is only supported by RTX 40 and 30 series graphics cards of the manufacturer. You must therefore be equipped with a latest generation GPU to take advantage of it. Also, even though NVIDIA promotes upscaling from 1080p to 4K, its technology can upscale from a 360p stream to 1440p in 4K up to 144 Hz framerate.
But it’s hard to imagine a clean rendering on sources as old and poorly defined as 360p. It would therefore be better to deactivate the feature to maintain readability. And precisely: access to RTX Video Super Resolution is enabled by default by browsers, but not the functionality itself.
Its activation will be done directly on the NVIDIA control panel. We hope that the developer has provided many options to allow us to precisely define the behavior of its scalingso as to reserve it for the best flows.
This technology has a lot of potential on PC. Besides the simple fact of being able use less bandwidth on a daily basis, it could be central in optimizing cloud gaming video streams to further increase rendering quality. Too bad that only Nvidia has considered the issue for the moment: we hope that AMD and Intel are also working on their own solutions for video, and why not in open source.
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Maxime “OtaXou” Lancelin-Golbery
