Y’know those sliding screenshot comparison widgets you see on sites with bigger production budgets than RPS? You can now have something just like that on your very own PC. ICAT, or Image Comparison and Analysis Tool, is also free to download from Nvidia.
Download the Gamer Ready 496.70 driver (out today), and you can enable it as a global or per-game setting in Nvidia Control Panel. You don’t even need one of the best graphics cards with all the RTX gubbins – any Nvidia GPU from the Maxwell family onwards (GTX 745 or better, basically) will work. However, unlike DLSS – and indeed, FSR – Image Scaling works on any game, not just those the developers have added support for. The biggest adverse differences between Image Scaling an DLSS as that the former doesn’t include its own anti-aliasing, instead upscaling the image using whatever AA was built into the game, and that it doesn’t get smarter about applying its effects over time.
It still involves rendering games at a lower-than-native resolution to improve performance, then upscaling the image until it looks more or less like it’s running at native. With its new upscaling algorithm, though, it is a lot like AMD’s rival FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR): a spatial upscaler that applies an adjustable sharpening filter in the same pass. Nvidia have launched a revamped Image Scaling feature that aims to provide a DLSS-style performance boost in your games – as well as ICAT, a new screenshot and video comparison tool that will let you see the difference for yourself.Īlright, so this new Image Scaling feature – an updated and upgraded take on the Image Scaling tool that’s been nestled within Nvidia Control Panel since 2019 – isn’t quite DLSS Lite, as it lacks any kind of AI/machine learning smarts.