Lossless Scaling is a $7 Steam app that’s flipped the idea of frame generation on its head this year. Similar to tools like Nvidia’s DLSS 3 and AMD’s FSR 3, Lossless Scaling offers frame generation. However, it works with any game, and with any graphics card, and it can triple or quadruple your frame rate with this frame generation. And now, the app is going further with a feature that even DLSS 3 and FSR 3 don’t have.
The developer posted the 2.12 beta to Steam on Wednesday, and it adds a couple of new features. The big one is a resolution scale for LSFG, the tool’s own machine learning-based frame generation algorithm. This allows you to decrease the resolution of the input frames, leading to a very minor quality loss in exchange for a fairly large performance boost. The resolution of the game doesn’t change at all. You’re basically giving the frame generation algorithm slightly less information to work with.
It’s a very clever way of improving performance that we haven’t seen from Nvidia or AMD yet. There are plenty of artifacts and oddities with generated frames, regardless of where they come from. The idea is that you won’t notice those issues because the generated frames are mixed in between truly rendered ones, and only displayed on screen for a few milliseconds. This new feature capitalizes on that fact, offering an additional performance boost with an almost imperceivable quality loss.
I tried it out in Cyberpunk 2077, and the feature works very well. At native 4K, I was able to max out my monitor’s 138Hz refresh rate by using 3X frame generation and setting the resolution scale to 70%. The difference between 100% and 70% didn’t even register at that high of a frame rate. However, as with all frame generation tools, it’s best to have a base frame rate of 60 frames per second (fps) before enabling frame generation.
In addition to the resolution slider for frame generation, the developer made a few other updates to the app. First, they removed LSFG 1. This was the first frame generation algorithm, which has now been fully replaced with the latest version. The app now supports SGSR v1 as well. This is Snapdragon Game Super Resolution, which is a lightweight upscaler built by Qualcomm that was created for the Adreno GPU. It should provide better upscaling results than some of the other options in Lossless Scaling, particularly on weaker GPUs.
This update is a beta release, which means you won’t see an update for the app in Steam. If you want to download the update, head to the Properties window for Lossless Scaling in Steam, and select Betas. Then select beta – beta from the Beta Participation dropdown, and you can download the update.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.