Nvidia's DLSS has changed the gaming industry by allowing games to run more smoothly and at a higher perceived quality while significantly lowering resource usage. But this technology does require an Nvidia GPU, and on top of that, the game you're playing also needs to be compatible, which isn't always the case.

Thankfully, a solution called Lossless Scaling exists, and it's a game-changer (get it?) for anyone with or without an Nvidia GPU. It aims for a similar goal, but it supports any modern PC and just about any game you can think of. For its relatively low cost, it's hard not to recommend it.

What Lossless Scaling can do

It works with everything

While DLSS is designed specifically for gaming and needs to be integrated into specific games by the developers, Lossless Scaling takes a much more liberal approach. It can be applied to essentially any app on your computer, scaling it from a smaller windowed resolution to a higher full-screen output. It doesn't need to be built for any specific game, and it just works based on the output you already see on your screen.

Lossless Scaling can upscale games using a wide range of algorithms and methods, too. You can use integer scaling if you just want to enlarge the image without any additional processing, you can use AMD's FSR, or the proprietary LS1 model from the Lossless Scaling team itself. That's what I generally go for, and because it works with everything, it can actually help with a lot of older games, or titles that just choose not to support DLSS.

And it's not just scaling, either. In the latest versions, Lossless Scaling can also provide frame generation, much like Nvidia's DLSS. You can choose fixed rates for generated frames, or use an adaptive approach that targets a specific framerate, similar to DLSS 4.5. Even if a game supports DLSS for upscaling, there's a good chance it may not support frame generation, so Lossless Scaling can cover those gaps, too.

This wide compatibility also makes it a lot easier to set up. You don't have to enable different DLSS settings for each game, or wonder if a game only supports DLSS, FSR, or Intel's XeSS. Lossless Scaling treats everything equally, and you can always enable it the exact same way. You do have the flexibility to create multiple profiles, though, in case you don't want every game to be treated the same way. You don't need an Nvidia GPU, either, or any specific brand. It just works.

Does it actually work?

It's surprisingly solid

To illustrate the capabilities of Lossless Scaling, let's take a look at a couple of games in my library. Nvidia claims that 980 titles support "RTX technologies", and this list of DLSS-supported games includes 818 items. That's a lot of games, but many more titles released before 2018 (and still many released afterwards) don't support this technology, and if you have a lower-end PC, you can't necessarily run all these games at their highest settings without some help.

One example I found in my library is Saints Row IV, which has no DLSS support. At the full 1920x1200 resolution and on Ultra settings, the game was running between 20 and 25FPS, which was hardly playable. But using Lossless Scaling (using the LS1 upscaler) from the base 1280x800 resolution, I was getting between 30FPS and 50FPS, and the game felt much smoother, with minimal impact to the perceived image quality. With frame generation at a fixed 2x rate, I was able to take it up to somewhere between 60FPS and 80FPS, which was a much smoother experience, and even then, image quality didn't seem to suffer very much.

Another title I've been spending a lot of time with on PC is the demo for Grip XR, which isn't out yet, but the demo is already amazing. It supports DLSS for upscaling, but not for frame generation, so instead of being stuck with the roughly 80FPS my laptop can churn out normally, I could crank it all the way up to 120FPS with Lossless Scaling in adaptive mode. This mode leans more heavily on generated frames, though, so using fixed mode is generally better.

Is it as good as DLSS?

No, but it's not meant to be

For games that do support Nvidia's DLSS — and assuming you have a compatible Nvidia GPU — may be wondering if Lossless Scaling is a better option than Nvidia's approach. And the answer is, expectedly, no.

In the aforementioned demo for Grip XR, I tried switching back and forth between Nvidia's DLSS using the Quality preset and Lossless Scaling upscaling from 1280x800 to 1920x1200, and to be completely fair, the results weren't too far off. To the untrained eye, you could probably swap between these two options and not notice much of a difference at all, even in performance. The game ran at a similar framerate in both cases, but it did seem like the edges around objects were sharper using DLSS. This is a game with a lot of fast motion and blur and distortion effects, which translate poorly with upscaling.

I don't have a PC capable of frame generation to compare the implementations (nor do I have a screen that would go above 120FPS where this might make the most sense), but in my experience, Lossless Scaling does a decent job here, too. I do recommend using the fixed mode at a 2x rate or so. In Grip XR, when I used the adaptive mode, the game usually tried to use around 40 rendered frames to achieve a 120FPS output, despite the game being able to run at roughly 80FPS when frame generation was disabled. This resulted in some weird hiccups and made the game less pleasant to play. I was able to get a higher frame rate by using a fixed 2x rate for frame generation, and things ran much more smoothly, too.

Lossless Scaling is worth the price of admission

The biggest hurdle to trying Lossless Scaling is that it's not free, but I'd argue it's absolutely worth the price of admission. For one thing, it's incredibly helpful if you have an older Nvidia GPU, a different brand of GPU, or no discrete GPU at all. A PC that's three or four years old may not have no kind of machine learning-based upscaling, and the $7 price tag for Lossless Scaling is nothing compared to what it would cost to upgrade your GPU.

But even if you do have a fancy GPU that supports DLSS and frame generation, you're then dependent on the games themselves supporting the feature, which many don't. Even beyond native PC games, you could, in theory, use Lossless Scaling to help emulated games run better, too. For $7, that's a lot of value, and you can keep getting use out of it even if you do upgrade your PC's hardware later on.