Nvidia's RTX GPUs Can Now Upgrade SDR Content To HDR Using AI

Nvidia is launching RTX Video HDR in its 551.23 Game Ready driver update, enabling RTX GPU owners to use AI to convert SDR videos to HDR in Microsoft Edge and Chrome. While subtle, it can add color detail to non-HDR YouTube videos when viewed on an HDR monitor. Like Nvidia's prior RTX Video Super Resolution for upscaling and sharpening web videos, the effect is minor but noticeable when toggling on and off.

Holy hell

[NobleNobbler]

I'm using it right now uncanny valley ahoy. My eyes pan robotically and with perfect tracking towards the camera. Perfect precision. Sometimes they even "snap" and instantly move from what I'm really looking at to the camera.

I love it. It's so overboard and such a humanly tone deaf use of AI.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

Well I'm liking the much higher definition in the images, but the fact that everyone now has six or seven fingers and legs that end in flippers will take a bit of getting used to.

your mom

[Anonymous Coward]

All of those old VHS tapes of your mom are about to get a second life! Fuck yeah AI!

FlowFrames

[JBMcB]

I've been playing around with FlowFrames, which interpolates extra frames for a faster framerate. It's kind of like the "motion smoothing" on TVs, but it doesn't make it look artificial. That is, you don't get the soap opera effect of everything looking fake, it just looks a lot smoother.

Re:

[PhrostyMcByte]

That sounds cool as hell. Is it reinterpreting shutter speed?

AI

[JBMcB]

With regular motion smoothing on TVs, they take two adjacent frames and interpolate a new middle frame using a simple algorithm.

FlowFrames uses AI pattern matching to draw a new middle frame from scratch.

It's hard to describe the difference, but TV motion smoothing looks fake and weird, but FlowFrames looks smoother. It looks closer to a TV show recorded at 30fps.

I've been playing around with it to try to fix some old poorly transferred 8mm film - adding cleaned up frames to compensate with some strobiness.

Re: FlowFrames

[SeaFox]

This isn't about motion smoothness, it's upscaling. I'm guessing this is a more advanced version of the AI upscaling they've had on the Shield TV streaming devices for years now.

As a Shield Pro owner (2019 version), I can tell you -- it works. It's not going to replace native resolution content and I recommend turning the edge enhancement filter to low, but it looks better than the normal upscaling algorithms. The only downside is it only works with video codes that are natively supported in hardware. So it

Re:

[Junta]

I don't know about "upscaling", that generally specifically refers to resolution. That is old news for them, they've been doing upscaling for a long time.

This is referencing interpolating a higher dynamic range.

FlowFrames is in the same general ballpark of AI interpolation of video content. Traditional upscaling extrapolates new content along X and Y axis, this article is discussing what is roughly interpolation across brighhtness/color gamut, and flowframes is interpolation along the time axis.

Upscaling

[JBMcB]

Upscaling is neat, but I'm more interested in frame interpolation for fixing old film transfers that suck.

I have some old, poor quality SD 8mm transfers that I'm cleaning up by:

Breaking the video out into individual PNGs with ffmpeg
Upscaling/restoring using Upscayl with the UltraSharp ESRGAN model
Adding some framerate using Flowframes

This cleans up the film remarkably well. I'm not even using a specific restore workflow, which exists, but I don't see the need.

Just a tangent here, but, Nvidia can blow me.

[MIPSPro]

I worked with Nvidia in 1999 while working on driver code for Silicon Graphics hardware. They were the worst people I've ever had the misfortune to be partnered with and I hope they are better, now...

In one instance I called to follow up on an email request I had for some MMIO documents for a video card we were working on implementing in several systems. They kept insisting I wasn't allowed to access this absolutely essential set of documents and delayed our project with politics and hoops to jump throug

Re:

[timeOday]

Take heart, there's a miniscule probability that the jerks you were working with aren't multi-multi-millionaires by now. That's about the best I can do, since they almost certainly are.

Re:Just a tangent here, but, Nvidia can blow me.

[Saffaya]

According to Linus Torvalds, they still suck big time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
"nVidia has been the single worse company we've ever dealt with"

Re:

[MIPSPro]

Thanks, it actually makes me feel better that it wasn't just me. However, even at SGI, they decided to break with Nvidia due to political issues probably started over there, but it's hard to say. SGI sucked pretty badly toward the end with Belluzo there. Once Eric Fortune left... well, things got depressing.

Re:

[MikeBabcock]

There's a difference unfortunately between the products I like the makers of and the products I like the performance of.
I would love to use AMD GPUs but dollar for dollar, NVIDIA's work better for me.
I would prefer that they release fully open drivers as a Linux guy, but their current drivers also work so well I'm very happy with NVIDIA hardware on Linux on the level of being a consumer.

A little confused at the demo

[PhrostyMcByte]

The very first video they show says that SDR content has gray blacks. Huh? SDR black is just as black as HDR. Maybe they are identifying content with incorrectly re-encoded black levels? The sample video looked like they took a game trying to be foggy and atmospheric and ran it through a contrast filter. If it's doing that, I certainly don't want it. This is framerate interpolation all over again, and we'll have a "Directors against you AI fucks messing with my color grading" campaign from Chris Nolan an

Re:

[Entrope]

we'll have a "Directors against you AI fucks messing with my color grading" campaign from Chris Nolan and James Cameron in a few years.

That's okay, in a few years the AIs will be posting thousands of gajillion-word essays about why those directors are wrong. Some of them might even make sense.

Re:

[cirby]

Sort of.

Yes, SDR black levels are technically the same, but they tend to be washed out in a lot of productions, especially with brighter images. This is because a lot of video (yes, even high-budget stuff) isn't shot to full spec. Laziness, lack of skill, lack of time, or sometimes just a director going for a certain look.

Shadows in SDR tend to be shot a little "hotter" because of dynamic range issues, though, so you end up with "blacks" that are closer to 10% (or much more) grays in many situations. Most p

Re:

[MikeBabcock]

No, SDR black is not just as black as HDR black. You can adjust your TV to make it appear so, but it isn't.
Instead of explaining it here: https://bitmovin.com/hdr-vs-sd... [bitmovin.com]

Re:

[PhrostyMcByte]

I used to code video filters, I'm very familiar with colorspaces and HDR. Black is black. That page makes the same unsupported assertion you have, btw. It must be confusing intentional editing with something in the technology.

Re:

[noodler]

Black is black.

Not in SDR..

Re:

[MikeBabcock]

Sorry dude. I can't help you if you won't believe the truth. But you're wrong in the modern era.

Re:

[noodler]

The very first video they show says that SDR content has gray blacks. Huh?

This is true. In SDR (NTSC/PAL) black really is dark grey. This is a leftover from the analog days.

just like real HDR I prefer it off

[bloodhawk]

samples were interesting, I actually found the ones with HDR OFF looked better in some of them.

Xbox has had auto-HDR for years

[nester]

and win11 has it too.

Give me back my acronym

[ukoda]

So you can upgrade my Software Defined Radio to a Hardware Defined Radio?

RTX Video Super Resolution

[ThurstonMoore]

I hope this is better than RTX Video Super Resolution I tried that out and it made my eyes bleed.

Re:

[thegarbz]

I hope this is better than RTX Video Super Resolution I tried that out and it made my eyes bleed.

Did it? What did you do wrong? Video SR has only a subtle but visual improvement over standard scaling algorithms in all cases I've used it. What are you trying to scale, a pure noise pattern?

AI resolution models are dependent on the model being tuned to the content. If there is a mismatch then yes your eyes can bleed. Tools like those from Topaz Labs give different models for a reason. RTX Super resolution seems to be generally fine for normal content, and frigging awesome for cartoons.

Re:

[bobbutts]

IMO It works really well for sports but isn't great for close up faces. Also really depends on how much you're upscaling. 1080 -> 1440 looks fine. 720 -> 2160 looks much less good.

Or even better

[Carewolf]

I can NOT do that..

Youtube only looks like

[dunkelfalke]

Wasn't able to enable it for any other video type, even when playing in browser.
That sucks.