Along with the RTX 40 Series Super cards and RTX Remix announced at this year's CES 2024, Nvidia also announced another AI feature that will be included in GeForce RTX drivers later this month. Joining RTX Video Super Resolution, which upscales low-resolution video streams in the browser, is RTX Video HDR.

Nvidia claims that much of the content streamed from YouTube and other sources is low-resolution, low-bandwidth, standard dynamic range content. And when it is viewed on a decent 1440p or 4K monitor, it does not look good. So Nvidia has developed RTX VSR (Video Super Resolution), which upscales 540p clips to 1080p or better.

While this addresses the low-resolution problem, Nvidia is now working on another. Many modern gaming monitors are HDR capable, using more bits per pixel to create a wider range of colors (aka high dynamic range, HDR). However, the type of video content that Nvidia hopes to improve with RTX VSR is also standard 8-bit (aka SDR).

This is where RTX Video HDR comes in! The exact details of how it will work are not yet known, but it will work the same way as DLSS and RTX VSR: a deep learning model will learn what an HDR version of the video should look like, and the GeForce RTX graphics card, via its Tensor core neural network and converts the video stream into an HDR one.

RTX Video HDR will work with any GeForce RTX card (20, 30, 40 series, etc.), but requires an HDR10 compliant monitor. This is one of the most common HDR formats and almost all monitors claiming to be HDR capable support this type. In addition, RTX Video HDR only works with video streams played back in Chromium-based web browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

Nvidia demonstrated the new technology at the CES 2024 event, and internal agent Jacob was able to see it in action. The changes he saw were, quote, "like night and day" when comparing SDR streams to those of RTX Video HDR. How well it will work with different GeForce RTX cards and HDR monitors is unknown at this time.

However, according to Nvidia, this feature will be coming to GeForce RTX and Nvidia RTX drivers later this month and will be a case of simply turning the switch on in the control panel. This is the same as RTX Video Super Resolution, which can be used in parallel with RTX Video HDR to achieve the best video quality.

When it becomes available, we will try it out ourselves and let you know how good it really is, but at least from our hands-on demo, it looks the business.

_____________________________________ PC Gamer's coverage of CES 2024 is courtesy of Asus Republic of Gamers.