Steam Play Proton could get direct support for NVIDIA Image Scaling

An engineer from NVIDIA has put up a Pull Request on the official Wine repository that Valve uses for Proton, suggesting a rather fun new feature be added.

Developer Eric Sullivan put up the Pull Request titled "Support for NVIDIA Image Scaling", if accepted it could mean a future release of Proton would enable users (of any GPU vendor - it's a simple shader) to upscale applications to the current display resolution with NVIDIA Image Scaling. The idea of that sounds pretty exciting, as the more options it supports the better.

While it's true developers can add options like this officially into games like what already happens with NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and other tech, this is much more of a brute-force approach to give Proton the ability to do it to any game, (a bit like how you can do FSR on the Steam Deck).

From the pull request:

This pull request adds an option to fshack to upscale applications to the current display resolution with NVIDIA Image Scaling. It can be enabled by setting the WINE_FULLSCREEN_UPSCALER environment variable to "NIS". The NIS upscaler also supports using FP16 storage by setting WINE_NIS_UPSCALER_USE_FP16 to 1.

It should go without saying but I will anyway: this might not be accepted, so don't get overly excited just yet.

ICYMI: NVIDIA are also working with Valve to get Gamescope working on their drivers.