NVIDIA takes on AMD FSR with their new open source Image Scaling

While NVIDIA has had DLSS available for a while, it does depend on game support with a compatible NVIDIA GPU. So we saw AMD come along with FidelityFX Super Resolution that worked across both vendors and now NVIDIA has something of an answer with their own open source Image Scaler.

The announcement came as part of their release of DLSS 2.3 today, which has numerous rendering improvements to give an even clearer picture.

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On Windows, the NVIDIA control panel has an option for a driver-based spatial upscaler which sadly Linux lacks and this has been upgraded. Thankfully, we won't entirely miss out on it as the newer Image Scaling is now open source, so any developer can add it into their game with the NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK v1.0 now available on GitHub under the MIT license. Hopefully it can then end up fully cross-platform then too.

NVIDIA say it offers "best-in-class" image quality when compared with other tech. They also showed off a comparison with this explanation:

Here’s a comparison from Necromunda: Hired Gun, comparing three scaling techniques against the game’s native rendering at 4K. On the left, with the game’s built-in temporal anti-aliasing, the monitor’s text is somewhat legible. Using NVIDIA Image Scaling and other spatial upscalers, the resolution is decreased to 2955x1622 and the text becomes illegible, though performance does increase to far more playable levels.

In contrast, NVIDIA DLSS renders at 1920x1080, but through the magic of AI and GeForce RTX Tensor Cores, image quality is better than native 4K, the monitor’s text is clearer, and performance is more than doubled, giving players the definitive experience in Necromunda: Hired Gun.