Must be nice, having the kind of money to throw around that you can afford an RTX 5090. Personally, I’m content with my 5060 – but there’s no denying that even the most affordable of Nvidia‘s latest slate of desktop GPUs is still out of reach for many PC gamers, and rising component prices due to the AI boom aren’t helping matters.
So I’m always on the lookout for good ways to boost performance that don’t involve spending a load of your hard-earned cash, and I’ve just learned about one of the best solutions in ages: a nifty little piece of software called Lossless Scaling.
This utility tool rolls both AI-powered upscaling and frame-generation features (as seen in existing tools like Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD‘s FSR) into one straightforward and greatly customizable app that enables performance boosts in games that don’t even natively support those options, as well as unofficial content, like emulators, and video content, like older 720p TV shows and films.
The best part? It doesn’t even need specific hardware. A frequent criticism of DLSS is that it needs an Nvidia RTX GPU to run, as well as newer iterations like the recent DLSS 4.5 locking some functionality behind newer cards.
Lossless Scaling can run on virtually any GPU, meaning that users with older hardware can effectively get a significant performance boost – reviewers have claimed that it “turns any 20/30fps game into a buttery smooth 60fps” and called it “the only app that will actually give your PC a little more life” – all for the low, low price of $6.99 / £5.89 / AU$10.25 on Steam.
Old dog, meet new tricks
Here comes the clever bit, though. Lossless Scaling obviously needs your graphics card to function, which means it’s diverting some of your GPU resources towards powering its capabilities. This means that while you’ll probably still see an overall performance boost on an older GPU like an RTX 2000-series card, your frame rate before upscaling and frame-gen are applied might actually be a bit lower.
However, the tool supports dual GPU functionality, which means that you can slot in a second graphics card (assuming your motherboard has two PCIe slots, but the majority do) and offload the entire upscaling and frame-gen process to the second GPU without any performance impact on your ‘main’ graphics card.
The two GPUs don’t even need to be identical, either — unlike the now-obsolete option of SLI-linking two cards to boost performance, you can have a more powerful card focus on simply rendering frames with no AI-powered cleverness happening, while the second card takes care of the upscaling and nothing else.
Although Lossless Scaling uses its own signature frame-gen tool (called LSFG), it enables the use of a range of different upscalers with their own customization options, so users who are willing to put in a bit of extra time experimenting and tweaking with their upscaling settings will see the best results.
No big loss
In other words, if you’ve got an old spare GPU kicking about, like the ever-dependable GeForce GTX 1060 or Radeon RX 580, you can essentially transform it into a frame-gen machine that boosts the gaming performance of your rig by making the two GPUs focus on entirely different workloads.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey, many PC gamers are currently running cards like the RTX 3050, 3060, and 4060 — and I have to imagine many of you upgraded from one of the older cards I mentioned above, and probably still have it sitting in a box somewhere.
Hell, even if you don’t have a spare GPU kicking about, you can pick up a 1060 for cheap these days since it ostensibly doesn’t support all the fancy new features offered by DLSS. If you’re on a gaming laptop, this unfortunately isn’t an option — but you could always try installing SteamOS and using the Linux-based plugin version of Lossless Scaling, which is totally free.
Getting it up and running is actually a pretty simple process, and Lossless Scaling had a nice, clean UI with multiple profiles that you can easily swap between — useful if you want to build different profiles for specific use cases. The official Steam page and Discord server have advice on which upscaler to use depending on the content you’re displaying, too.
It’s worth noting, of course, that as a third-party tool for upscaling and frame-gen, Lossless Scaling isn’t perfect. While it does boast a ‘Very Positive’ user rating on Steam with 14,000+ reviews, it’s not going to make a huge impact on systems that are already very low-powered (like older laptops running on integrated graphics), and some users have reported that using the modes above 2x frame-gen (so producing three or four times as many frames, rather than just doubling the target frame rate via standard frame-for-frame interpolation) does frequently lead to artifacting issues or noticeable input latency.
But you know what? I don’t even think Nvidia’s DLSS really works that well at 4x frame-gen in a lot of games, at least not in my personal experience on an RTX 5060. For anyone who’s struggling with lackluster performance on older hardware, Lossless Scaling could be an effective — and more importantly, affordable — solution.
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christian.guyton@futurenet.com (Christian Guyton)
