While consoles are struggling to even render games at 1080p, PCs more modern, more powerful (and yes, more expensive) GPUs are capable of rendering and playing today’s games at significantly higher resolutions, at significantly higher frame rates. With cards like Nvidia’s new 900 series, gamers can crank up their resolutions to 4K and beyond, and still run games at playable frame rates.
If gamers don’t have 4K monitors, those with the new Maxwell cards have been able to use DSR, Nvidia’s implementation of supersampling. What it does, essentially, is render compatible games at exceedingly high resolutions, and then scale them down to fit your display. Depending on the game, it could give you better visual fidelity than post-processed anti-aliasing at a lower processing cost. In the end, it’ll help make your games look even better. And now, Nvidia’s opened it up to its older cards. With the latest set of drivers, cards based on their Fermi & Kepler GeForce GTX Desktop GPUs are now also able to use the feature. If you’re running a 400-series, 500-series, 600-series, or 700-series video card, you can now render your games at 4K, and downscale them to your 1080p screen, making everything look crisper and cleaner.
Yes it’s just supersampling with a new marketing term, and of course, if you’re an enthusiast, you’ve been doing this anyway – though manually. Now it’s all automated, and enabled right in GeForce Experience, and it takes the strain off the monitor.
“Alongside our record-breaking, critically-acclaimed GeForce GTX 980 and 970 graphics cards, we introduced a new software feature that enables gamers to enjoy 4K-quality graphics on any HD screen. Called Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), the tech is built into GeForce Experience’s game setting recommendations, allowing players to dramatically increase image quality with a single click. How it works is simple: compatible games are rendered at a higher, more detailed resolution, and the image is intelligently shrunk back down to the resolution of your monitor using a custom-made filter, giving you up to 4K-quality graphics on your screen.”
