PC World - USA (2019-10)

32 PCWorld OCTOBER 2019

NEWS NVIDIA’S GAMESCOM GAME READY DRIVER

should work in “all” GeForce GPUs in

DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 games. The blog

post said DirectX 12 and Vulkan let the

game decide when to queue frames

for rendering, so the driver would

have no control over lowering latency.

Another feature Nvida showed off

was integer scaling. The mode is

designed to help retro or pixel-art-

based games run at higher resolutions

without sacrificing sharpness. Yes,

again, if this is familiar, it’s because Intel

made hay about integer scaling (go.

pcworld.com/hysc) to support the

retro community in July. Intel, however,

couldn’t support integer scaling until

its first Gen 11-based CPUs (go.

pcworld.com/gn11) got to consumers

at the end of August. By adding

support at the mid-August Gamescom

event, Nvidia could say it was actually

first to support integer scaling.

The other clap back came in the

form of a new Freestyle Sharpening Filter

in GeForce Experience. Nvidia said the

filter offers improved image quality and

performance over its current “Detail”

setting Freestyle filter. Yup, again, there

must be an echo in the room, because

sharpening was a feature AMD touted at

its launch event for the Radeon 5700.

The company made sure to point out

the superiority of Radeon Image

Sharpening over Nvidia’s DLSS.

Although we don’t know the performance

cost of Nvidia’s Freestyle Sharpen Filter,

A new Ultra setting cuts down on pre-rendered frames

from the game engine and sends it to the GPU ASAP.

Turing-based Nvidia cards can now do integer-scaling,

so you can play retro games at high resolution without

losing sharpness.