GeForce R530 display drivers with RTX VSR later this month
NVIDIA confirms plans for a new branch of GeForce drivers.
At CES 2023 NVIDIA unveiled its RTX Super Video Resolution technology that will improve video quality by artificial upscaling content to higher resolution. This feature would be available on the latest RTX 30 and 40 GPUs in February, and RTX 20 series with support coming later.
This week Google released Chrome 110 web browser that already supports RTX VSR according to the changelog. However, the technology will not work until NVIDIA releases a new driver that enables it.
The company confirmed that VSR will be controllable through NVIDIA Control Panel, it will also be responsible for checking if the GPU supports this technology. Furthermore, NVIDIA software team commits to Chromium reveal that VSR will only work with R530 drivers or newer. Therefore, the R520 (528.49) driver released this week simply does not have this feature enabled yet.
Manuel Guzman (Software QA at NVIDIA) stated that R530 branch will launch later this month. In other words, VSR support will only launch as this driver is deployed.
R530 GeForce driver, Source: NVIDIA Forums
It does not seem that users can force the VSR to work manually, but even if they did, the feature will not work without NVIDIA Control Panel. Moreover, NVIDIA confirms that the technology will not work on battery-powered systems because it requires more power when used. This means that VSR will only work if external power 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