One of the great benefits of PC gaming is the ability to take matters in to your own hands. Not enough games support your favorite feature? Unhappy with the frame rate your PC is producing? There’s all sorts of applications that can let you tinker and optimize your PC gaming experience.
Many of these are rather niche, but there’s one that I would recommend just about every PC gamer install. It’s called Lossless Scaling, and if you haven’t already heard of it, I’m about to make your day.
How Lossless Scaling scaled up
Six years ago, a simple upscaling app called Lossless Scaling showed up in Steam. For the majority of its existence, it’d only drawn a daily userbase of less than 100 people. You could run a game at a lower resolution, and Lossless Scaling would apply an upscaling algorithm to boost your performance. Think AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) or Nvidia Image Scaling (NIS). The upscaling didn’t look great, but it provided a small boost for older hardware.
Now, as we close out 2024, you’ll find 3,000 to 4,000 people with Lossless Scaling loaded up at any given time. That’s an increase of 560%. What happened? Well, on January 10 of this year, Lossless Scaling introduced a feature called LSFG 1.0. It’s a frame generation algorithm built through machine learning that can add frame generation to any game. Now that’s enticing.
Nvidia has DLSS 3 and AMD has FSR 3, both of which offer superior frame generation, but Lossless Scaling was now bringing the feature to any game and with any graphics card.
This is about the time I jumped on the bandwagon, picking up Lossless Scaling to help along my second playthrough of Elden Ring in preparation for the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. I was blown away by just how well it worked.
And really, LSFG 1.0 was just the beginning for Lossless Scaling this year. The app has been on a tear since the first model was introduced. In June, it added 3X frame generation, offering a performance boost even beyond what DLSS 3 and FSR 3 can offer. In August, it went to 4X frame generation. And just last month, Lossless Scaling received resolution scaling for generated frames, adding a feature that FSR and DLSS completely lack.
Lossless Scaling has morphed from a niche Steam app into a utility that every PC gamer should have installed on their PC. It’s been so influential that AMD basically ripped the app’s functions wholesale for its impressive AFMF 2 update, which offers frame generation to any game, but only with AMD GPUs. Even if Lossless Scaling never receives another update — and I seriously doubt that — it’s already had a huge impact.
Frame doubling everywhere
All of this growth for Lossless Scaling throughout 2024 wasn’t an accident. The app is sincerely useful, and useful to just about any PC gamer. I’ve had it open on a second monitor for nearly every minute I’ve spent playing games on my PC this year, and there are a couple of key reasons why.
For me, Lossless Scaling helps fill in the gaps. I play on a PC packing an RTX 4090, and fortunately, I’m usually not struggling in the performance department. And even still, I’ve found a ton of uses for Lossless Scaling throughout the year. One of the biggest boosts it’s offered has been in games like Elden Ring that are normally capped to 60 frames per second (fps). Lossless Scaling can give me 120 fps, 180 fps, or even 240 fps just by clicking a button.
There are still plenty of games without frame generation, as well. For instance, I’ve been playing a lot of Path of Exile 2 recently, and although the game supports DLSS and FSR upscaling, it doesn’t come with frame generation. With Lossless Scaling, I cap my frame rate at 60 fps, turn on frame generation, and get a consistent, locked 120 fps.
This is easily my favorite way to use Lossless Scaling. Even with a ton of PC power, games like Path of Exile 2 show big performance dips, particularly as you progress toward the endgame. Upscaling helps, but it still doesn’t get around some nasty frame rate drops when the screen lights up in elemental vomit. Games with a large performance window like Path of Exile 2 or Destiny 2 really benefit from Lossless Scaling.
In one of these games, you might hover around 100 fps, but you’ll see dips toward 60 fps when there’s a lot going on. That inconsistency is noticeable. It doesn’t matter if 60 fps feels “smooth.” If you’re oscillating between a high frame rate and a low one, you’ll notice the difference. Lossless Scaling allows you to essentially drop to the lowest point of your performance window and use frame generation to boost you back up, providing a consistent experience with little to no frame drops.
The not-so-obvious uses
Those are two obvious use cases. Add frame generation to games that don’t have it, and bypass fps caps in games without messing with mods or worrying about interfering with anti-cheat software — as is the case with Elden Ring. But Lossless Scaling actually goes further. Remember, it works with any game and any graphics card.
If you’re emulating a game, for example, Lossless Scaling is fair game. Particularly when emulating older consoles, there are loads of games capped at 30 fps, and Lossless Scaling can smooth them out. As someone who constantly uses EmuDeck to emulate games across PC and my Steam Deck, I’ve used Lossless Scaling for emulated games too many times to count.
In fact, you don’t even need to be running a game on your PC for Lossless Scaling to work. If you have a capture card and preview window, you can apply Lossless Scaling to the gameplay preview. I wouldn’t recommend this setup — the latency between frame generation and playing out of preview window adds up quickly — but it works.
On the graphics card front, Lossless Scaling doesn’t call for any particular hardware. You can use it on a Windows-based handheld like the Lenovo Legion Go or Asus ROG Ally — though, unfortunately not on the Linux-based Steam Deck. Or, you can use it on older integrated graphics available on a desktop or laptop.
Throughout this year, I actually used Lossless Scaling to play Lords of the Fallen and System Shock on an Asus ZenBook S 16 through the integrated graphics. Despite the powerful CPU in this laptop, the iGPU couldn’t hope to run a game like Lords of the Fallen at a playable frame rate. But Lossless Scaling, in these cases, literally makes the impossible possible.
Essential for any PC gamer
There isn’t another app I can think of on PC that I’d recommend to just about any PC gamer. Even extremely useful utilities like Special K aren’t right for every PC gamer. Lossless Scaling is something I would — and have — recommended to every PC gamer, though. It really doesn’t matter if you’re playing older games with weak hardware or you have the best of the best for the most demanding games coming out today. There’s a good chance you can find a use for the app.
At the time of publishing, Lossless Scaling is part of the Steam winter sale, so you can pick it up for 20% off. Even when the sale is over, though, the app only costs $7, and it’s received a ton of free updates throughout this year alone. Hopefully that level of support continues into 2025.
