A LOT OF DIGITAL INK has been spent recently on extolling the virtues of resolution upscaling in games. This new technology allows games to run in a lower resolution internally, before being upscaled to a higher pixel density with apparently no effect on performance.

Of course, there’s always a cost, and that’s why upscaling features are often gated behind hardware upgrades. If you want the latest version of Nvidia’s DLSS, which includes frame generation to boost frame rates as well as resolution, you’ll need a GeForce RTX 4000-series card. The same thing will almost certainly happen when the 5000 series is released.

There is, however, a software solution that can allow upscaling features to run on unsupported hardware, and it’s on Steam. Called Lossless Scaling, and with a cool rubber ducky icon, it’s a Windows-only app that can add various scaling modes, sharpness settings, and even performance boosts and frame generation into games that otherwise might not support them, though it requires a pretty powerful card to pull this off. As you’re reading Maximum PC, though, chances are you have one humming away in your rig already.

–IAN EVENDEN

1INSTALL

Lossless scaling is available on Steam [Image A], so finding and installing it is an extremely simple process.

It’s a $6.99 app, but we’ve seen it go for as little as 80 cents during sales. The software takes up less than 6MB of space on your SSD, too, and despite having been initially launched back in 2018, is under constant development. It received a major update back in August that added support for an X4 frame generation mode that can boost 60fps to 240fps, and offers initial support for G-Sync. One thing to note with Lossless Scaling is that it requires the game to run in a window rather than full-screen, but this is a small price to pay for the increased performance it can offer.

» It opens as a simple-looking window with a few options visible, but scroll down, and you’ll find more hidden out of sight on the right-hand side. To use it, you set the options you want, hit the ‘Scale’ button, then have five seconds to switch to the game you want to scale before it times out. Judicious use of Alt+Tab may be required [Image B].