Make your GPU faster for $7 (REAL)

Whether you want to use AI upscaling or not, many modern games basically force you.

That is, if you want to turn up all the details and still get playable frame rates.

But I don't want to shell out for a new graphics card just to unlock a feature that I never really wanted in the first place.

There has got to be a way to squeeze more out of the GPU I already have.

And there is.

It's one of the best kept open secrets to get more performance for your dollar and cost just 699, nice, or 420 cents on sale.

Extra nice.

It's made by one developer and the best part is it works on pretty much any graphics card, new or old, in every game.

Meet Lossless Scaling, an app that can both upscale your games from lower resolutions and even use frame generation to multiply your FPS by as much as you want.

albeit with mixed results once you get past a certain point.

And that's not all.

Man, I need to see this for myself.

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To start things off, both David and I are gonna be experiencing Doom the Dark Ages on a 4070 TI at 4K high without any form of scaling or frame generation.

This is really a great example of a modern game that really doesn't run perfect if you're not using any kind of cheat.

So why don't we cheat?

Control Alt S will toggle lossless scaling, which we've configured with two times frame gen, which

is a lot smoother, but like any frame generation technology, I'm still feeling 40 FPS worth of input latency.

With that said, I was expecting the image quality of those interpolated frames to be worse.

Oh, it's really not bad.

It's really not bad.

I think if I didn't know Frame Gen was on, I would have a hard time immediately recognizing that it was.

Which is both a good thing and a bad one.

Yes.

Okay, now you've tried the two-time multiplier.

Do you want to go higher?

I do want to go higher.

This is your first look at this interface, too.

Super straightforward.

So clean.

Multiplier.

Oh, God.

Okay.

Just try three to start.

Okay.

It's definitely smoother, but now I'm really getting that uncanny, it almost feels like motion smoothing on my TV.

You know, like it's not right.

Yeah.

But I mean, when you look back over at this native 4K, which experience do you think you would rather have?

I'm looking for motion anomalies and they're not, they're there, but they're not bad.

Well, I had reason to believe that this would be substantially worse frame gen than the stuff that Nvidia and AMD has, but...

It's pretty darn good.

But can I multiply it even more?

Oh yeah.

I'm going to 5X.

That's more than Nvidia can do.

So I have about 45 FPS native.

Oh, wow.

Oh, that's interesting.

It's not even pretending that I'm able to do much more than about, oh no, that is about 5X right now.

It's just your base frame rate drops so much because so much computation is happening on your graphics card.

Right.

So there's a reason that Nvidia capped out their solution at Forex.

It's just so costly on the compute side that you're not getting enough base FPS to even get a net benefit from it.

Interesting.

Yeah, the higher your multiplier goes, the more I think native is the better choice.

Yeah, this is not only not a better experience than what I was trying before, but this is not a good experience.

What we want to explore next is fixed versus adaptive frame gen.

So fixed is just the multiplier like Nvidia has, but adaptive,

will add in between frames to hit a set frame rate, sort of like a computational variable refresh rate to oversimplify it a lot.

So instead of having my multiplier, I'm gonna go adaptive and I'm gonna say, I want a game at, I think 120 is asking a lot at these settings, but maybe I want a game at about 85 FPS.

I think that's a really nice sweet spot.

It's much, much better feeling than 60, but not so intense as like 120 or more.

My base frame rate really is still a little bit too low.

Like 40 feels input laggy.

I would probably want to turn this game down a little bit, but in terms of the smoothness, it looks pretty darn good.

Well, I'm not playing, so I can't ascertain the input latency, but in terms of visuals, that looks high refresh rate.

It looks great.

It looks really good.

You can do 120 though.

I wouldn't.

It feels too uncanny.

Like the disconnect between how the latency feels and how the smoothness looks is just too great.

There's actually one more slider we can mess around with to change the performance.

So why don't you switch to loss of scale and I'll show you.

This is the flow scale.

Basically, it's the size of the images that are going into loss of scale.

So it takes the full screen, and then it lowers the resolution to process that the lower your flow scale is.

And so right now, the sweet spot's between 50% and 60%, which is where we are.

But you could theoretically get a better image out of the higher flow scale, because there's more information for it to process, and more performance at the low end, because those images are being shrunk and processed faster.

Interesting.

So let's try 40.

Sure.

Okay, so turning it down is supposed to give me like maybe less computational overhead?

A little bit.

It seems like you're like a few frames higher, but then you might notice more anomalies in your generation.

What a great utility.

Can you imagine a world where like GPU vendors just built stuff like this that's completely platform agnostic and just

No nonsense, here's the sliders, here's what everything does.

There's no obfuscating what the actual performance is.

Like their FPS counter tells me how many real frames I have and then how many of them are generated.

Like just don't mark it to me, just tell me what it is.

Obviously there are limitations and we're seeing them, but overall, if I didn't see how well this worked with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe that this could be made by just one person.

How?

Okay, well, like many programs that benefit from open source projects, it's not actually one person, but one of the most impressive pieces.

Lossless Scaling FrameGen is.

So we reached out to the creator of Lossless Scaling, who goes by the pseudonym THS, to explain how it works.

Lossless scaling frame generation is a convolutional neural network developed from scratch.

It takes only the final frame as input, and specifically in the LSFG3 version, is capable of generating any number of intermediate frames for arbitrary timestamps.

This enables both adaptive and any multiplier fixed modes.

Compared to DLSS or FSR, which receive extensive information from the game engine, LSFG operates with significantly less input data.

While this limits its potential output quality,

Yeah, about that.

Lacking motion vectors to help process the image and not being able to differentiate HUD elements from game objects means that visual anomalies can be pretty distracting in some situations.

But it also gives LSFG a major advantage in terms of a wide range of use cases.

To ensure broad compatibility across GPUs, the trained model was manually ported to DirectX 11 compute shaders.

LS captures via game frames and processes them via LSFG shaders, functioning effectively as a DirectX 11 application that generates and displays frames at the appropriate times based on the selected mode.

That is probably the coolest part.

There is no requirement for specialized AI hardware and DX11 GPUs have been mainstreamed for well over a decade now.

So yeah.

the image quality can only go so far, but just about anyone can take advantage of it.

There are some other caveats.

A big one is that you're gonna wanna keep your GPU usage to around 85% to avoid spikes that really hurt lossless scaling's quality, which, wait, 85%?

I bought the whole GPU.

I wanna use the whole GPU.

Well, don't worry.

THF thought of that.

Another super cool thing about lossless scaling is that it can be run on a secondary GPU or even your integrated graphics, which reduces the load on your primary gaming card and frees up a little bit of extra performance.

Now,

Our results with an iGPU were pretty underwhelming, but the idea of an upscaling coprocessor is one that really intrigues me.

A lot of people have old GPUs kicking around, and hey, maybe this $7 piece of software can give it a fresh raison d'être.

Let's give it a shot.

Now let's get this started.

There are a couple of things that we changed from the B-roll though.

I actually ended up using the slot that was right next to my primary card because it runs at 8X rather than 4X and the data rate to our secondary GPU actually does matter.

The other thing that we need to do is we have to unplug from our primary GPU and actually run our display off of the secondary GPU.

So this one drives the display, but this one is providing the main gaming grunt.

It's just routed through the secondary card.

What does this do, the Velcro?

Oh, the Velcro is to push these cards apart a little bit so this one doesn't overheat.

Lttstore.com.

Now we just need to configure lossless scaling.

So we'll change our preferred GPU to RTX 2060.

That's our preferred GPU for scaling to use.

Then we're gonna go into our graphic settings in Windows, and we're gonna change our default high-performance GPU to our faster one that we don't actually have our display plugged into.

So for us, that's a 4070 Ti.

You may also find that you need to add an exception for the specific game, but not always.

Let's lose the adaptive scaling for now then.

And let's go back to trying like a three X multiplier.

Am I getting better performance than before?

I feel like I'm not.

It's as bad, if not worse than it was before.

Okay.

And this sucks.

This is really bad.

Almost at 30 FPS.

Yeah, which is not high enough for a good gaming experience.

You know what though?

The 2060 is probably not powerful enough to do 4K frame gen.

So you are at the mercy somewhat of the performance of that secondary card.

It can't just be like any ancient card if you're hoping to run at the highest resolution and detail settings.

Do we have like a 3060?

Yeah, we do.

Oh, perfect.

Okay, let's do that.

I feel good.

It's gonna work good this time.

Oh, it's gonna be so good this time.

If we'd done like 2X frame gen or if we were running at a lower resolution with that 2060, probably would have been fine.

But we want 4K gaming.

At least for now.

4K.

Well, yeah.

Here we go, here we go.

So my native performance is exactly what I'd expect.

Control Alt S and woo!

Woo!

and my native performance stays exactly the same, and I get frame gen.

This is the best experience I've had with it so far.

Okay, this is pretty good.

Doesn't do anything about the latency, but wow, what a cool idea.

You wanna see how high the number we can go?

I mean, sure.

Yeah, I guess with the dedicated card we could multiply higher.

Or we can do this with the base resolution.

Should I go to five this time?

Yeah!

Okay, I'm going to five.

I'm going to five, boys.

Dude!

Look how smooth that is.

That's crazy smooth.

It looks high refresh rate.

It is, but it looks it.

Dude!

I am getting a 5x frame gen multiplier.

Wow.

It still feels, in terms of input lag, like 40 FPS, but...

Artifacting is not immediately perceptible either.

I mean, this is a pretty like, you know, early 2000s brown filter over everything game.

You lost your scaling.

Oh, I did?

Yeah.

What just happened?

Oh, my God.

I think I lost the scaling.

Oh, no, wait, no, it's back.

200 frames.

Oh no!

Now, it's worth noting that the resolution that I perceive in motion is not as good as when I'm holding still.

And that's a significant drawback of these kinds of scaling technologies is that if they don't know which direction an object is going because they don't have motion vector data from the game engine, you're going to lose some of the clarity when you are in motion.

I wouldn't use this for a competitive game by any stretch of the imagination.

Look at your HUD.

Look at that crosshair.

Sometimes when you move really fast.

Whoa!

Whoa!

You know what's funny is when I was playing, I didn't even notice it, though.

Whoa!

As soon as you're looking for it, it's crazy.

Yeah, that's pretty bad.

We are doing 5x frame rate, though.

And that's another thing that is a disadvantage when you don't have any kind of input from the game.

Like, hey, maybe don't alter these HUD elements.

It's something he could add in too.

In ReShade, you can separate HUD elements manually.

And so I could see on a game per game basis, allowing people to have the HUD be processed separately from the rest of the scaling.

Maybe.

Maybe.

It'd be pretty tough because then you're losing some of the advantages of this software is that it just kind of works on everything.

100%.

And then you're building profiles again.

And then you're basically just doing what AMD and Nvidia are doing.

Fair enough.

Overall, I don't think there's a question that I would rather play with this on... Maybe turn off the 5x so it doesn't look as stupid.

Yeah, here, let's... Go back to 2.

Let's go to a more reasonable scaling multiplier.

Maybe 2.

Yeah.

At this point, I don't think there's much of a question.

I would... Now that you're seeing the thing, it's like it's...

It wasn't as bad before.

I think it's even worse.

That's interesting.

Okay, look, let me try yours again.

Oh!

Oh!

Okay.

No, no, no.

It's fine.

It's fine.

It doesn't matter.

It's just like, I was questioning whether I would turn this on and I'm like, oh, maybe.

Neither of these are what I would configure because I would want a higher base frame rate regardless, even if it means turning down some details.

But there's no question that the software is pretty impressive.

And we haven't even touched on the actual scaling that it was originally named for.

THS said that the reason they originally made lossless scaling was that they bought a 4K monitor for coding and their computer couldn't handle it for gaming.

Now,

Obviously, you can just run your monitor at a non-native resolution, but at the time, graphics drivers could only do nasty Hobbits' soft bilinear scaling.

Yuck.

So, THS developed the first version to make sharp, sexy integer scaling a breeze, and then just

kept adding features until we got the flexible array of options that we're left with today.

It's even great for non-gaming applications.

Do you love anime?

Well, you can boost the sharpness with Anime 4K.

More into emulating retro games?

THS included XBR scaling to make pixel art games really look their best.

And if you want to scale your demanding 3D games, well, hey, you can try AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution FSR or NVIDIA Image Scaling, even in games that don't support them.

That versatility and the convenient package it's wrapped in is genuinely fantastic.

Let's try using FSR.

Let's start with Doom the Dark Ages, which actually does support FSR.

So David is going to turn it on in-game, and then I am going to turn it on using lossless scaling.

I'm also going to disable my secondary GPU because that's not really apples to apples otherwise.

So I guess I want the optimized version, a non-original optimized version of AMD FSR, which is less powerful.

Yeah, let's leave that off.

Sharpness, let's leave that in the middle.

To do that, I need to set my game to borderless windowed, and then I'm going to set my resolution to whatever I would want my input resolution to be for my scaling technology.

So let's go with 1080p.

I want to really play at a high frame rate.

Now we go into lossless scaling and we set our type to FSR.

We're just gonna leave it on auto, I guess.

Right, will that do a 2X factor?

Well, it's gonna bring it to whatever your monitor's resolution is.

Oh, brilliant.

Okay.

Oh yeah, right.

I'm definitely scaling because I was running at that lower resolution before and if it's not on, it's running like this.

And if it's on, it's running like that.

That's a lot of tearing.

we are running into some VSync issues.

I've noticed there's limitations based on the monitor's refresh rate when you're using loss of scaling.

And because we're going to a capture that is limited to 60, we are going to be kind of locked around 60, even if you turn VSync off and everything.

Let's lose the capture then, and we'll just use the over the shoulder.

Wait, how are you at 93 FPS?

IFSR is on.

Oh, that's right.

I forgot.

Okay, so now we're pixel peeping a little bit.

Why don't we just play for a little bit first?

Hey, I'm getting more FPS than you.

No, I just want to make sure that my settings are correct.

That was our performance would be 1080p.

Ooh, now I'm not feeling the latency, boys.

Well, those are real frames.

They're just lower resolution.

Do you know what, man?

They look pretty okay to me.

Yeah, I can't immediately tell the difference in sharpness between ours.

Oh, I'm up at 100 now.

Performance is quite similar.

And mine was easier to set up than yours was.

That's fair.

We had a little finicky problems.

It's definitely not as sharp.

Like, I'm looking at these chains that there's baddies kind of hanging down from or whatever.

But same with mine.

The native FSR is not perfect.

Now, is this supposed to be as good as proper integrated FSR?

I don't think so, because I think the integrated FSR gets access to a little more information than just the output frame.

It really doesn't look that different to me, though.

I mean, can you do me a favor and go find that chain again and then just, like, do the same back and forth?

Because I've got crazy ghosting on mine.

Whoa, buddy!

Mine's not doing it.

Huh.

I would have assumed that the one built into Doom would be better, but I don't know if that's necessarily true.

Another big one is distant foliage.

So let's just find a tree or something to look at.

Here we go, against these mountains.

They're like these birds and stuff behind you.

Behind?

Up there, yeah.

I am not perceiving a major difference here.

No.

Oh, you know what?

Nah, this tree is better on yours.

Yeah, you're right.

Definitely.

Yeah.

So it looks like it's gonna be a bit of a mixed bag, but what's cool about lossless scaling is I have all other kinds of different options.

Which one do you want?

LS1.

LS1, let's do it.

That's the scaling that they built.

Yeah.

I don't think it's as good as that.

Yeah.

Well, let's look at the chain.

Yeah, the tree's not as good.

I can tell you that much for sure.

Hey, my chain's still better than your chain though.

Got them.

This is so crazy.

I mean, that's the thing with all of these technologies is they do tend to be a bit of a mixed bag and you're gonna have to play around and find out what works best for you.

And again, what's cool about lossless scaling is that I don't even need the game to support it at all.

So why don't we fire up a game that doesn't support lossless scaling?

Like...

Halo Infinite?

No.

Why?

Because... Why do you guys never let me play Halo Infinite on set anymore?

Well, first off, you play too long.

Secondly, because of the way Halo Infinite does its resolution, we can't change it to a smaller size to scale up.

So it won't work with lots of scaling in that way.

Yay!

Halo Infinite!

Woohoo!

And I'm getting more FPS, boys.

Not by that much.

As for image quality, let's have a look here.

Hey, meet me at the bazaar.

The bazaar.

The bazaar.

Stop it.

I'm doing a video.

Leave me alone.

You shouldn't put so many bots in the game then.

You don't get the option to change much.

Okay, let's see.

I mean, yeah, I'm upscaling from 1440, but like, this is pretty good.

The text is a little fuzzy.

Like that's noticeable to me, but like I have to go looking for it.

Not bad.

Of course, I'm not getting a huge performance benefit right now either.

I'm getting about the same frame rate that you are.

Wait, do I not have it on?

I do have it on, because I have my performance counter.

Okay, I'm gonna turn on frame view as well, just for lols.

My image quality looks darn near the same as yours, but my FPS is also darn near the same as yours, so... Yeah, you're doing a little bit better than me.

I'd be interested to try the adaptive frame rate.

I think that's one of the cool use cases for it.

If you have an old esports monitor that doesn't support variable refresh rate, you can kind of just force it computationally and hit a consistent frame rate, even if some of those frames are generated.

Okay, let's turn on frame gen and have a look at how things go.

Okay, so I love that this, the first thing I think when I see LSFG is let's go.

Okay, I'm gonna try 2x multiplier to start.

With the higher input frame rate, dude, obviously it doesn't feel quite right.

It looks really smooth.

I can force it to artifact.

Like look at this crane in the back.

Oh yeah.

Like I can make it kind of do weird stuff, but it's not the sort of thing that I would notice if I was just playing the game.

No.

Okay.

Hold on.

Let me try yours for a sec.

Let me try yours for a sec.

Yeah.

Dude.

I would play on that one for sure.

No question, actually.

Like, I thought I was going to be like, well, the pros and cons, you see, they kind of somewhat outweigh or they don't outweigh.

And it's surprising.

This is kind of like an esports situation, and I thought this would be totally something that is not in the wheelhouse of loss of scaling.

Okay, switch again.

I wanna see, I wanna confirm.

It just goes to show that frame generation is best in situations where you least need it.

My base experience is pretty good.

It's just a little boosted by that frame gen.

I gotta say, I like it, which you might see as a reversal from my previous position where

Generally, I avoid upscaling or frame generation technologies whenever possible, but there's a big difference to me between what AMD and especially Nvidia have been selling, which is fake frames for real dollars, and what THS is selling, which is a shot of adrenaline for your older card for the very reasonable price of $7.

And I know that some folks are still gonna be adamantly against using scaling technologies or frame generation technologies of any sort, but

The controls in here are granular enough that I think even if all you want is an extra five or 10% headroom on an older card or to hit a target frame rate, you might appreciate having this tool in your toolkit and deciding for yourself if it's

worth the compromises.

I guarantee that you have $7 games in your Steam library right now that you've played less than you'll tinker around with this.

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Just like you should check out the last time we did something fun with a GPU.

Okay, that was fun and very dumb, but boy, did it ever go brr.

And like this kind, brr, it was cold.