Every modern gamer with a high frame rate monitor should have this in there tool box. I mainly got this for its potential to make lower frame rates higher, I was not concerned with resolution. I mainly game at 1920x1080. I for one would choose FPS over resolution, but that is me.
For testing I tried all kinds of games out. From arcade classics to modern 3D games. The way it works is fairly simple, you first start LS. Make you a profile, I recommend you just call it general and you can use it for every thing. For me, the settings I changed were Type - LSFG 3.1, Mode - adaptive, it defaulted to 240 like my Desktop refresh rate. Turned Performance to on, Scaling type - off (as I only wanted FPS here not resolution) I set preferred GPU to my RTX 4070. And that is basically my profile. And I have to remember to ALWAYS choose the profile right after I open LS in Steam, EVERY TIME.
When it can be used, it seems to make all games better. As in higher frames get closer to feeling like real life motion at least to me anyway. It seemed to make the motion of all games better, especially older 80s and 90s arcade games. Anything smooth movement, like a projectile, is even smoother now.
Whereas in the past I have seen companies do some over scaling up convert jobs, this felt actually decent. And acceptable. Like truly getting more out of these old games. The only artifact I would notice occasionally is how in older games a dying enemy blinks out, this would cause a hyper vibration effect. But hey, whenever I would see that and not much, it pales in comparison to what this program actually added.
But, it is not just old games this thing can benefit, case in point would be Mortal Kombat One or Twelve as in the actual 12th cannon MK since they began in the 90s. You see, MK One the fights ran at actual 60 fps, but some of the cutscenes ran 30. This actually made it uniform, AND, it allowed me to get 240 fps in the game. Many in that games Steam forum want an ability to get beyond 60 yet it is frame locked. This gets around that issue,
And dare I say as an old MK player going back to when it started, this gave it that arcade snap it had back then.
But don't get me wrong, if there is a case where you can get actual rendered real frames from a game. I think you should go for that option. Case in point would be Battlefield 4 @ real 240 hz, especially the island and water maps of Naval Strike. I thought looked amazing. But that is more raw horsepower GPU and CPU.
Not to say there is not some horsepower being displayed here with this app, there surely is.
I have been thinking a lot lately about what makes or made a game "fun". The most common variables seems to be frames per second, resolution, screen size, and perhaps the greatest yet silent variable..LAG. The CRT or "Cathode Ray Tubes" of the past seemed to have no perceivable lag, and they were uniform in that they were all the same. Meaning, if you got good at say a 90s fighting game, you would still be good at that game essentially where ever you played it. Back then, 60 fps seemed to be the magic number. Big game companies like Sega seemed to know this. But CRT was a totally different technology, an electron gun scanned a glass screen and the phosphorus screened glowed, Sure the vertical resolution was 60 hz, but the horizontal? That was up in the thousands , and dozens of thousands.
I can't help but wonder then now with video games is it like a quest to get back to just what we once all had? A simple, yet "fun" game. I saw video games come from nothing, I am a Gen-X "latch-key kid". Video games were an offshoot of carnival games and board games and that is what they felt like. We didn't play them for hours on end, nor did we have to go through extensive training and tutorials in order just to play. For a Gen-X kid, the "attract mode" of an arcade game was our tutorial, we watched a loop or two of those and then by the time we presented our quarter we had some idea how to play that game.
Frogger would be like checkers or chess. Space Invaders would be like a shooting gallery. Simple, yet they had speed, action, and overall not too violent or gory. Not too complicated controls. The Atari 2600 was the first wide spread home console for here in the states, and those controllers had ONE button. And many of those early games had ONE developer. credited to the games.
In the case of how I use it, Lossless Scaling is created interpolated frames that go in between what is already there.
How to use it - I told you before how to make a profile and what I used for a FPS boost to 240 HZ, here is how to effectively use it with your games,
1. Start LS................
2. Select you profile or make your settings (easier to select a general profile imho)
3. Start your game (this doesn't have to be JUST Steam games)
4. With you game loaded, on its title screen, hit Control + Escape or whatever to get out of the game without actually closing the game. With LS still there in the background go to it. That "button" in the upper right that reads "Scale", Yoiu press that button when you are ready. It will then countdown from 5. This gives 5 seconds to get back in your game.
5. Go back into your game. The way this works is FOCUSED base, which means you will have to click on the game window for it to work.
Now...there is a setting that was default for me in Loss Scaling called "Draw FPS" which was set to on.
IF, all goes well, it will show first a zero in the upper left hand corner and then something like 60 / 240 That is how you know it is working. The number on the left is the original FPS, the number on the right is what LS is pushing it too.
It doesn't work with everything and perhaps I don't know certain tricks and techniques to get it to work more than I actually did. LS seems to like when there is a clear close or stopping of a game. I found that if there was a situation that I would end up having to control alt delete to end task a game, I was better off ending LS FIRST, else it often led to reboots for me. It doesn't take but seconds to get LS going again from Steam. Also something to note is you will have to press that "scale" button every time between games.
I think this could be the future right here, games that push interpolated frames very high to balance the actual horsepower to push real rendered frames. I suppose the same thing could be done with audio, Which I also experiment with high sample rate digital audio for its also not just more realistic and smooth sounds but the low lag or latency.
I am believer in high frame rates for that simple early 80s arcade snap and liveliness. I made the default frame rate of my game Star Quest 120 FPS. Using LS on that the effect was not night and day, nevertheless the action that was there was smoother.
You can get Star Quest here at this link.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4717860/Star_Quest/
