NVIDIA Releases Open-Source Image Scaling SDK With Cross-Platform GPU Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Releases Open-Source Image Scaling SDK With Cross-Platform GPU Support

Along with introducing DLSS 2.3 today, NVIDIA is making public an open-source Image Scaling SDK with promised cross-platform GPU support...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Image-Scaling-SDK

[Danny3]

No shit!
What's the catch?

[andre30correia]

and will dominate the market and others will become useless, like always

[bple2137]

So it's not really open source DLSS and existing games that use DLSS are not going to magically provide this feature for non-NVIDIA users, but instead games can now implement yet another upsampling solution that this time is cross platform, am I getting it correctly?

[V1tol]

Another marvelous solution from the best company! /s

[bug77]

So it's not really open source DLSS and existing games that use DLSS are not going to magically provide this feature for non-NVIDIA users, but instead games can now implement yet another upsampling solution that this time is cross platform, am I getting it correctly?

And this upscaler can also tap into DLSS, if available. Sounds more like something that should live in DX and Vulkan, honestly.

[timofonic]

Welcome to the upscaling mess. Please standarize this ASAP, Vulkan at least.

[furtadopires]

welcome to the upscaling mess. Please standarize this asap, vulkan at least.

save us khronos!!!!!!

[dlq84]

I don't agree this should be in Vulkan Upscaling is post processing. Like AA and the like.

[jntesteves]

Guys, it makes no sense standardizing upscaling. As hardware gets faster, we'll keep getting more powerful upscalers. It makes sense to keep these as shaders, the GPU is programmable exactly for that purpose.

I wrote an analysis of FSR on my new blog a couple of months ago, if anyone's interested.

Seeing NIS (NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK), I thought I might try to port it to RetroArch too and compare it to FSR. Now that I've cloned the repo and had a look at it, I can already say that that's not going to happen.

Here's a preliminary quick comparison for anyone interested:

• NIS is a shader, like FSR;
• NIS is a D3D compute shader. FSR is portable HLSL/GLSL generic shader code;
• NIS seems to do both upscaling and sharpening on a single pass. FSR uses a separate pass for each;
• NIS is abstracted at a higher level than FSR. While on my analysis of FSR I wrote that it's not really a "compute shader", because it's only a collection of low-level functions that can be called anywhere, NIS is a higher-level API that makes many assumptions about the environment where it's being executed (an HLSL v5+ compute invocation).
• NIS makes no attempt to be portable or support anything besides D3D11+, so I can't easily test it on Linux with Vulkan or OpenGL. While FSR runs on anything remotely recent.
• NIS seems to be just a low-effort drop of code that had no value to NVIDIA (I could be wrong on this assumption, this point is more of a personal opinion, take it with a grain of salt).

Final thought: If you want to make a good release of reusable open-source shader code, learn from AMD's GPUOpen.