Category: Gaming

Without making any major changes to your hardware, Nvidia’s latest technology allows you to play older games at higher resolutions and smoother frame rates. Starting in January 2019, all GTX 10-series GPUs can be used to improve the visual quality of games without affecting performance — and newer GPUs will have more features as they become available. With this AI-powered scaling, Nvidia wants to make it easier than ever to stay up-to-date with your PC games, especially when you already own the hardware needed to run them.

How it works

The magic happens using a deep neural network—this is a type of artificial intelligence that Nvidia has been working on for years. Essentially, it breaks down an image and tries to figure out how to make it look as good as possible without adding any additional processing overhead. This might seem easy, but even simple image recognition is tough for computers because there are so many variables at play—you need a powerful GPU to make sense of all that data, or you can use AI. GPUs are much better at handling these high-dimensional problems than traditional CPUs, which means they’re often used in AI applications such as facial recognition software. They’ve also become increasingly important in machine learning research. All told, Nvidia’s new technology doesn’t change anything about your game or add new features—it just makes it look great while also making sure your hardware works efficiently. As a result, you’ll get smooth frame rates with fancy AA and AF settings enabled rather than choppy performance with little benefit over turning those options off. In other words: You can have your cake and eat it too! Even if you don’t upgrade to a GTX 1080 (or whatever NV’s top tier GPU will be by then), GeForce Experience’s algorithms should help improve game quality across older hardware.

Should you get an RTX card?

Your graphics card plays a big role in your computer’s performance, but you might be able to make it perform better with a few simple upgrades. One way is through artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia announced its new RTX line of graphics cards at CES 2019 earlier in January. The highlight feature is Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTX), an AI technology that uses ray tracing for high-quality shadows, reflections and lighting effects—basically, turning every pixel on your screen into a miniature light source. This generates incredibly realistic images that look like they were captured by cameras instead of rendered by computers. Sadly, not all games support RTX features yet. Most only support old games made using DirectX 9 or 10. But those games will still benefit from Turing’s massive improvements over previous generation GPUs: more than double the graphical processing power per second. If you want great visual quality without making huge performance compromises, these are definitely worth considering. But should you upgrade? It depends on what kind of PC gaming you do right now; if it looks good enough to suit your needs now then there isn’t much reason to invest in an RTX card unless you plan on playing newer titles as well down the road when they’re available with real-time ray tracing support too.

Why AI-scaled graphics are better than native 4K

When you play a game on your PC, you usually have to make a choice between better graphics and better performance. In other words, you can either choose higher resolution or smoother framerates, but not both. Nvidia’s new AI-powered scaling is changing that: it makes games look great at any resolution without significantly impacting performance. So if your goal is just to play older games (not buy new ones), in 2019 AI-scaled graphics are a good way to go. It even works with VR! Right now there are only two titles with support for what’s officially called Dynamic Super Resolution+, but expect more developers to integrate this feature as time goes on. That means players will be able to enjoy 1080p gameplay at 3K resolutions using only a GTX 1060 GPU and still maintain 60 FPS—or 60 fps at 1440p while playing Battlefield 1. And remember, DLSS doesn’t require extra hardware like RT cores found in AMD’s Vega cards. A Pascal GPU will do just fine.

What can I expect from my current PC

To put it bluntly, not much. While you may have a good enough gaming PC, you don’t need to be a professional benchmarker to know that hardware has advanced significantly since your rig was built. To get decent frame rates in modern games, you can expect around 40 frames per second for entry-level gaming PCs (but likely less for AAA titles), and 60fps is considered high-quality play at 1920×1080 resolution on medium settings. Anything above 60fps will get you truly smooth performance with everything maxed out. If even these modest goals seem unrealistic with your current setup, then I wouldn’t recommend trying to retrofit an older game—the performance hit may not be worth it in terms of fun versus frustration.