Tag Archives: OpenGL

NVIDIA Image Sharpening Guide for DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL!

NVIDIA Game Ready drivers now support Image Sharpening for Vulkan and OpenGL, as well as DirectX games. However, you will need to manually turned it on, and set it up.

In this guide, we will share with you the benefits of turning on NVIDIA Image Sharpening, and how to turn it on for your DirectX, Vulkan and OpenGL games!

 

NVIDIA Image Sharpening For DirectX, Vulkan + OpenGL

NVIDIA first introduced Image Sharpening as a NVIDIA Freestyle filter. They then built it into the NVIDIA Control Panel, enabling it for all DirectX 9, 10, 11 and 12 games in the Game Ready 441.08 driver onwards.

Starting with Game Ready 441.41, they officially added NVIDIA Image Sharpening support for Vulkan and OpenGL games too.

Image sharpness can be adjusted on a per-game basis, or applied globally for all supported titles, with per-game settings overriding global settings.

In addition, you can use your NVIDIA GPU to render at a lower resolution for improved performance, and scale it to the monitor’s native resolution, using Image Sharpening to improved the clarity of the upscaled images.

However, this is a global setting, and cannot be disabled or enabled on a per-game basis.

Note that if you are using a GeForce RTX or GeForce GTX 16-series graphics card, they will leverage the Turing GPU’s 5-tap scaling technology for better image quality.

Recommended : Learn How To Add ReShade Filters To GeForce Experience!

 

NVIDIA Image Sharpening : How To Enable It Globally

  1. Download and install GeForce Game Ready 441.41 driver or newer.
  2. Open the NVIDIA Control Panel, and click on Manage 3D settings.
  3. Scroll down the Global Settings tab to Image Sharpening.
  4. Select the On option, and you will have three further options.
    GPU Scaling : All resolutions below the monitor native resolution will be upscaled by the GPU
    Sharpen (0 to 1.0) : This controls the amount of image sharpening
    Ignore film grain (0 to 1.0) : This reduces any film grain that is generated by image sharpening
  5. Click OK and you are done!

Note : GPU Scaling is only available as a Global setting.

Recommended : How To Enable NVIDIA NULL For G-SYNC Monitors Correctly!

 

NVIDIA Image Sharpening : How To Enable It On A Per-App Basis

  1. Download and install GeForce Game Ready 441.41 driver or newer.
  2. Open the NVIDIA Control Panel, and click on Manage 3D settings.
  3. Click on the Program Settings tab and select the game you want to apply image sharpening.
    If you cannot find the game, click Add, choose the desired game and click Add Selected Program
  4. Scroll down to Image Sharpening.
  5. Select the On option, and you will have two further options.
    Sharpen (0 to 1.0) : This controls the amount of image sharpening
    Ignore film grain (0 to 1.0) : This reduces any film grain that is generated by image sharpening
  6. Click OK and you are done!

Note that the per-app setting will override the global settings.

 

NVIDIA Image Sharpening : Current Limitations

As of 26 November 2019, NVIDIA Image Sharpening has the following limitations :

  • Scaling is not supported on MSHybrid systems.
  • HDR displays driven by pre-Turing GPUs will not support scaling
  • Scaling will not work with VR
  • Scaling will not work with displays using YUV420 format.
  • Scaling uses aspect ration scaling and will not use integer scaling
  • Sharpening will not work with HDR displays
  • GPU scaling engages when games are played only in full-screen mode, and not in windowed or borderless windowed mode.
  • Some G-SYNC displays have a 6-tap / 64-phase scaler which scales better than that offered by Turing’s 5-tap/32-phase scaler.
  • To avoid accidentally triggering scaling by applications or DWM, first change to the desired (non-native) resolution from the NVIDIA Control Panel and then launch the application.
  • Turing’s 5-tap upscaler may not engage on certain monitors, based on the monitor’s vblank timing.
  • Turing’s 5-tap upscaler may not engage if the input resolution is greater than 2560 pixels in either the x or y dimension.
  • Scaling is turned off automatically when switching display devices.
  • “Restore Defaults” option in the control panel currently does not revert the upscaling resolution.

 

Death Stranding : Get It FREE With GeForce RTX!

From now until 29 July 2020, you will receive a Steam code for the PC digital download edition of Death Stranding with the purchase of these selected GeForce RTX graphics card, laptop or desktop!

 

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NVIDIA Vulkan Drivers For Kepler & Maxwell GPUs Available

by Neil Trevett, NVIDIA

 

If you’re a GeForce gamer, you already have what you need to take advantage of what the Vulkan API can do. If you’re a developer, you will now have the choice of a new tool that will give you more control, and greater performance, on a broad range of devices.

Our support for Vulkan, on the day it launches, not just on multiple platforms, but in cutting-edge games such as The Talos Principle, has some of the industry’s most respected observers taking notice.

“To be able to play a game like The Talos Principle on the same day an API launches, is an unheard of achievement,” said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. “NVIDIA’s multi-platform compatibility and fully conformant driver support across many operating systems is a testament to the company’s leadership role in Vulkan’s development.”

 

What Is Vulkan?

[adrotate banner=”4″]Vulkan is a low level API that gives direct access of the GPU to developers who want the ultimate in control. With a simpler, thinner driver, Vulkan has less latency and overhead than traditional OpenGL or Direct3D. Vulkan also has efficient multi-threading capabilities so that multi-core CPUs can keep the graphics pipeline loaded, enabling a new level of performance on existing hardware.

Vulkan is the first new generation, low-level API that is cross platform. This allows developers to create applications for a variety of PC, mobile and embedded devices using diverse operating systems. Like OpenGL, Vulkan is an open, royalty-free standard available for any platform to adopt. For developers who prefer to remain on OpenGL or OpenGL ES, NVIDIA will continue to drive innovations on those traditional APIs too.

 

Who’s Behind Vulkan?

Vulkan was created by the Khronos Group, a standards organization that brings together a wide range of hardware and software companies, including NVIDIA, for the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs for authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. We’re proud to have played a leadership role in creating Vulkan. And we’re committed to helping developers use Vulkan to get the best from our GPUs.

Why You Should Care

Vulkan is great for developers. It reduces porting costs and opens up new market opportunities for applications across multiple platforms. Best of all, the NVIDIA drivers needed to take advantage of Vulkan are already here. On launch day we have Vulkan drivers available for Windows, Linux, and Android platforms. See our Vulkan drivers page for all the details.

Here’s what Vulkan will mean for you:

  • For gamers with GeForce GPUs: Vulkan’s low latency and high-efficiency lets developers add more details and more special effects to their games, while still maintaining great performance. Because a Vulkan driver is thinner with less overhead, application developers will get fewer performance surprises. This translates to smoother, more fluid experiences.NVIDIA is shipping fully-conformant Vulkan drivers for all GeForce boards based on Kepler or Maxwell GPUs running Windows (Windows 7 or later) or Linux. “We have been using NVIDIA hardware and drivers on both Windows and Android for Vulkan development, and the reductions in CPU overhead have been impressive,” said Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack.GeForce gamers will be the first to play the Vulkan version of  The Talos Principle, a puzzle game from Croteam that also shipped today.

    “We’ve successfully collaborated with the NVIDIA driver support team in the past, but I was amazed with the work they did on Vulkan,” said Croteam Senior Programmer Dean Sekuliuc. “They promptly provided us with the latest beta drivers so we were able to quickly implement the new API into Serious Engine and make The Talos Principle one of the first titles supporting Vulkan. Smooth!”<

  • For professional application developers using Quadro: Our Vulkan and OpenGL drivers use an integrated binary architecture that enables the use of GLSL shaders in Vulkan. Developers also have the flexibility to continue using OpenGL or plan a smooth transition from OpenGL to Vulkan to take advantage of Vulkan’s new capabilities.For example, Vulkan’s multi-threaded architecture can enable multiple CPU cores to prepare massive amounts of data for the GPU faster than before. For design and digital content creation applications, this means enhanced interactivity with large models.
  • For mobile developers using Tegra: We’re making Vulkan available to developers for both Android and Linux. Vulkan will ship alongside OpenGL ES as a core API in a future version of Android. This means that standard Android will have a state-of-the-art API with integrated graphics and compute, ultimately unleashing the GPU in Tegra for cutting-edge vision and compute applications, as well as awesome gaming graphics. Developers can use Vulkan on NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV and SHIELD tablets for Android coding, and Jetson for embedded Linux development.

 

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AMD Vulkan API-Enabled Radeon Beta Driver Launched

AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) is excited about the imminent release of the ratified Vulkan 1.0 Specification by the Khronos Group. We started this journey in June of 2014 when AMD submitted the XGL proposal based on our work on Mantle. Once accepted by the OpenGL Next working group, AMD helped steward it through committee via our role as spec editors.

With this transition to public availability of the Vulkan 1.0 API specifications, AMD will be releasing a beta version of our Vulkan API-enabled Radeon Software driver. This new driver, in-concert with Radeon graphics hardware, enables PC game developers to remove historical software bottlenecks which will unleash new, rich visual gaming experiences.

 

What Is AMD Vulkan?

As a complement to OpenGL, descended from AMD’s Mantle, and forged by the industry, AMD Vulkan is a powerful low-overhead graphics API that gives software developers deep control over the performance, efficiency, and capabilities of Radeon GPUs and multi-core CPUs.

Compared to OpenGL, AMD Vulkan substantially reduces API overhead, which is background work a GPU or CPU must do to interpret what a game is asking of the hardware. Reducing this overhead gives hardware much more time to spend on delivering meaningful features, performance, and image quality. AMD Vulkan API also exposes GPU hardware features not ordinarily accessible through OpenGL, and uniquely supports Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Android, and Linux.

With the consortium of hardware and software companies that make up the Khronos Group, AMD is looking forward to the delivering the latest and greatest game rendering technologies to millions of users and many operating systems simultaneously:

“The release of the Vulkan 1.0 specification is a huge step forward for developers. The AMD Vulkan API, which was derived from Mantle, will bring the benefits of low-overhead high-performance Graphics API to the benefit of cross-platform and cross-vendor targeted applications,“ said Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “The promotion of open and scalable technologies continues to be the focus at AMD, as a pioneer in the low-overhead API space. As a member of the Khronos Group, AMD is proud to collaborate with hardware and software industry leaders to develop the AMD Vulkan API to ignite the next evolution in PC game development.”

 

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If you like our work, you can help support out work by visiting our sponsors, participate in the Tech ARP Forums, or even donate to our fund. Any help you can render is greatly appreciated!