A YouTuber has pushed Nvidia’s AI upscaler DLSS to its absolute limits: less than 900 native pixels were turned into a reasonably coherent 4K image – but understandably, it only becomes truly playable at higher resolutions.
With the arrival of DLSS 4.5, Nvidia has given its in-house upscaling technology a major upgrade. The new generation has already undergone several extreme tests that demonstrate the potential quality gains.
Tech YouTuber “2kliksphilip” opens the next chapter in this context and goes to the absolute minimum: His experiment starts with a base resolution of 38 x 22 pixels, from which DLSS 4.5 generates a 4K image (3,840 x 2,160 pixels).
10,000-fold upscaling
In other words, DLSS 4.5 took a total of exactly 836 pixels from the games Control and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as a basis for upscaling an image to Ultra HD resolution. Nvidia’s upscaling must therefore increase the original resolution by a factor of 10,000. For comparison: even in regular Ultra Performance mode, a game runs natively at 720p.
With this minimal resolution, the tech YouTuber’s result is, as expected, less than optimal:
- Surprisingly, however, the final image remained coherent enough to distinguish main objects and recognize larger details.
- With the rendering resolution increased to 136 x 76 pixels or 164 x 92 pixels, the image remained weak but showed significantly more detail.
Judging by the experiment, DLSS 4.5 allows the first “reasonable” game runs at a resolution of 401 x 226 pixels.
Here, the current upscaling generation increases the pixel count by a factor of 100 – and the image quality is sufficient to play through a game without any major problems, even if the graphics are somewhat reminiscent of the muddy images from before the turn of the millennium.
At 764 x 432 pixels, the upscaled image finally becomes so sharp that it is only partially recognizable that it has been upscaled 20 times. According to the YouTuber, this resolution marks the point in certain games where DLSS delivers practically usable results in extreme operation.
To answer the question in the headline: According to the experiment by “2kliksphilip,” the DLSS 4.5 neural network only needs 328,520 pixels to deliver a playable experience.
