The new NVIDIA R530 drivers with RTX Video Super Resolution will be released this month

Introduced by NVIDIA at CES 2023, RTX Super Video Resolution technology improves video quality by artificially upscaling content to a higher resolution. This feature will be available on the latest RTX 30 and 40 GPUs in February, with RTX 20-series support coming later.

Google released the Chrome 110 web browser this week, which already supports RTX VSR according to the changelog. However, the technology will not work yet until NVIDIA releases a new driver that enables it. NVIDIA confirmed that VSR will be controllable via the NVIDIA Control Panel, which is also responsible for checking if the GPU supports this technology. In addition, NVIDIA’s software team reveals in their posts on Chromium that VSR will only work with R530 drivers or newer. So the R520 driver (528.49) released this week does not have this feature enabled yet. According to Manuel Guzman (Software QA at NVIDIA), the R530 branch will be released later this month. In other words, VSR support is introduced only with the deployment of this driver.

Apparently, users cannot manually force VSR, but even if they did, the feature would not work without NVIDIA Control Panel. Also, NVIDIA confirms that the technology will not work on battery-powered systems, as it requires more power when in use. This means that VSR only works if an external power supply is available.

The feature will be gated by the same disable_vp_super_resolution flag to ensure a minimum required nvidia driver version (currently targeted at version 530.xx). There will be no deviceid-based gating, the driver will decide this internally with only the latest generation of GPUs being supported initially.

Just like for the Intel counterpart, the feature has an impact on the GPU power consumption during video playback, so it will only be active when we are running on an external power supply and automatically disabled when we detect a switch to battery power.

There is no user-accessible toggle provided through Chromium, instead a new system-wide option will be added to the NVIDIA Control Panel application for users who want to manually turn the feature off.

– Romain Pokrzywka, NVIDIA

Source: NVIDIA Forums, Chromium