Lossless Scaling and You: A Rapid-Fire Guide

Steam is widely known and recognized as one of the best PC gaming platforms, but did you know it also plays host to a whole bunch of utility-level apps, to boot? One of them is Lossless Scaling: a phenomenally powerful scaling and frame-gen application that can be injected into just about any game you may wish to play.

You read that right, yep: Lossless Scaling is an effectively universal gaming utility that can be used on anything and everything, as long as it supports windowed or borderless windowed rendering. From the cutting edge AAAs all the way to emulated, frame-capped classics, they can all make good use of tools and options found in Lossless Scaling. Best of all, the app is really easy to use... provided you know what you're actually looking for. That's where we come in.

What is Lossless Scaling?

Lossless Scaling is a comprehensive set of utilities that allow users to inject image scaling techniques and - arguably more importantly - frame-generation into games that otherwise might not support these technologies. In simple terms, Lossless Scaling can be your one-stop-shop for image quality and performance improvements... of sorts. However you flip it, though, it's an extremely handy utility that is useful to have around for edge cases in niche games, if nothing else.

There are two things that make Lossless Scaling as useful as it is:

It takes some legwork to figure out which scaler works best for what type of content, of course, especially you've got options ranging from Sharp Bilinear scaling all the way to Nvidia Image Scaling! The specifics of what's what will differ from one user to the other, so we recommend loading up a game you're quite familiar with and then giving each of LS's scaling options a shot. Just to get a good sense of how each behaves in practice, and where they may come in handy!

Is Lossless Scaling better than in-game upscalers and frame-gen?

The big question many of you will ask, though, is whether Lossless Scaling is of any use when almost every modern game comes with support for Nvidia DLSS and AMD's FSR 3.x? The answer to that is - not particularly! In-game image (up)scaling solutions are bespoke options that simply perform far, far better than Lossless Scaling could ever do, and so they should be your go-to option whenever possible.

However, this is where those edge-case scenarios come into the picture. Take Helldivers 2, for example: a game that surprisingly offers rather crummy anti-aliasing, only the most basic FSR upscaling, and no frame-generation whatsoever. The simple truth is that Lossless Scaling can make games such as Helldivers 2 look and perform miles beyond anything they could do natively, and the one-time $7 investment that the program asks for is going to pay for itself basically instantly in that case.

Of note here is that, even though both Nvidia and AMD's bespoke frame generation solutions are objectively better than that of Lossless Scaling, they miss a vital feature: Adaptive Frame-Gen. Some context first, though!

The old approach to AI-based frame generation is that the feature can only ever double, triple, or quadruple the amount of native frames generated by a game. This is why it is necessary that you, for example, cap your in-game frame rate to 60 if you wish to generate exactly 120 frames in total. Your every other frame is going to be generated, and the latency between the native and the generated frames is going to be ideal for input and gameplay purposes.

Well, Lossless Scaling's innovative Adaptive Frame-Gen - AFG - dynamically modifies the fractional multipliers between rendered frames to exactly maintain a specific frame-rate you want to target. Frame pacing is thus basically perfect across the board, but you can also get away with running your games at, say, 80 or 90 FPS with them being supersampled to exactly 120 FPS. You get superior image quality, fewer visual anomalies, and a really minimal increase in input latency. It can also be toggled on or off with a macro input, making it easy to decide if you like the effect or not!

How to make the most of Lossless Scaling?

One of the best use-cases we've discovered for Lossless Scaling is precisely the one we outlined above, with Helldivers 2, STALKER: GAMMA, and other such titles that have trouble maintaining rock-solid frame-rates at absolutely all times, or come with crummy, questionable resolution scaling options.

For example, both Helldivers 2 and STALKER: GAMMA have extremely bad baseline anti-aliasing, and so our go-to option has been to leverage DLDSR and then downsample the image to get crisp, perfect edges at all times. DLDSR basically renders games at a higher-than-native resolution, and then uses your Nvidia GPU's on-board AI to downsample them for optimum performance gains. This results in essentially perfect image quality at 1440P, but frame-rate obviously suffers. To alleviate this issue and reach an absolutely perfect 120 FPS at all times, we use Lossless Scaling's AFG.

So, though we don't necessarily recommend relying too much on Lossless Scaling's actual scaling all that much, the app's handling of Frame-Gen is essentially effortless and can be used to get perfect frame-times across the board.

It's going to be a case-by-case scenario for Lossless Scaling for sure, but having it around in case it's necessary has been nothing but a boon. Further, having frame-gen tied to a third-part app instead of first-party in-game options means you know exactly how it's going to behave in action, and you're not relying on devs who may or may not poorly implement the feature. As was the case with Forza Motorsport's frame-gen, for example.

Optimal Lossless Scaling Settings

Now for the nitty-gritty of using Lossless Scaling in practice. Here's what you need to do to get the most out of the tool:

Then, head on over to the 'Setting's sub-menu in the lower left corner of the Lossless Scaling UI and set up a neat little hotkey to toggle your adaptive frame-gen on and off. From that point onwards, you're going to be able to fiddle around with AFG on a per-game basis, and though it won't be a great fit in every single scenario, you're bound to find use for it sooner or later.

No loss, you’re the loss.