Woah

Im not going crazy, right? Those are absolutely CNN upscaling artefacts.

Sure that this is not your hardware clientside?

Not necessarily. This kind of thing will also happen if you chain upscaling, quantization, smoothing and sharpening techniques.

What's the video link?

I don't really see how and why they would do it. What's the video? You can check the codec they used with right click > "stats for nerds", the codec should say which algorithm they used to encode/decode the video. Using CNNs client-side for this task would probably be quite cpu/gpu intensive and I doubt they would do it (except perhaps if it's an experiment). And using CNNs server-side wouldn't make sense if it increases the size of data download.

It does look like CNN artifacts.

It's possible, if you have one of the very newest graphics cards, that it is your very own hardware doing this and not the website. Dunno

Heres the video link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPUGPLAfhTk

But if YouTube are doing A/B testing your hardware/account/IP/region might not be marked for rollout yet.

I think it's clientside. Which is why I mentioned perhaps its using a GLSL based CNN which is absolutely possible in WebGL2 and I've been experimenting with that sort of tech myself (not for upscaling, but just as a proof of concept CNN in WebGL).

It's a GTX 1660 Ti in a tablet laptop. No other video platform does this.

I do not have these artifacts

I'm definitely not seeing whatever you're seeing, if I set that video to 144p and full-screen it (1440p monitor) I get an unwatchable mess, not an unwatchable mess that's been upscaled and sharpened like your screenshots.

I want to know why this was removed. I saved a screenshot of the post

Yeah that's really weird. We're documenting google chrome silently adding upscaling. I think it's a really worthwhile discussion for the community to figure out what model its using as well as how they're implementing it in a cross platform, GPU agnostic way that is buttery smooth and doesn't use a tone of resources.

Okay. This is occuring in Chrome, but only Chrome (not Discord or Edge). It happens on YouTube and Vimeo. But this doesn't occur in others' Chromes even though we're on the same version 109.0.5414.75 (Official Build) (64-bit) (cohort: Stable)

Correction: Vimeo does this. It's only in Chrome. But other people also running 109.0.5414.75 (Official Build) (64-bit) (cohort: Stable) do not see this behaviour.

What version of Chrome? What's your region? I'm in the UK, using a GTX 1660 Ti (but Chrome running on Intel Iris graphics) with chrome version 109.0.5414.75 (Official Build) (64-bit) (cohort: Stable)

Same Chrome build as you, GTX 1080. I'm US but usually have my VPN set to somewhere in eastern Europe, no difference after turning it off. I see this.

Reddit automatically removed it, likely due to editing the post. Don't know why, but that occasionally triggers their spam filter. I've approved the post again.

Lol i used to love panga

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/4/23538584/nvidia-ai-upscaling-browser-chrome-edge-30-40-series-gpu-graphics-cards-4k-1080p

This possibly?

They announced upscaling support in Chrome at CES 2023.

>The new feature will work within the Chrome and Edge browsers, and also requires an Nvidia RTX 30-series or 40-series GPU to function. Nvidia didn't specify what exactly is required from those two GPU generations to get the new upscaling feature working, nor if there's any sort of performance impact, but at least this isn't a 40-series only feature.

Interesting though that it's working with your GTX 1660 Ti. Maybe Chrome is implementing a simpler upscaler as a fallback for older GPUs?

Check your chrome://flags for anything that looks related.

Its not even running on my 1660 Ti. It's running on my integrated intel graphics. Dedicated graphics is completely idle during this. Aaaand theres nothing related in the Chrome Flags at all.

I have neither a 30 or 40 series card... plus this is running on integrated graphics.

[deleted]

It might be anything in your particular tech stack, not just YouTube. Very interesting though, about time too.

Then check the JS source code

I believe that this might be fully true. I’ll tell you why:

I don’t know how many times I’ve felt like the voice of speakers in videos have sounded like they are AI generated.

Like, voices of people that I subscribe to.

I am was convinced that they were doing some AI fuckery, and this post only pretty much confirms it.

It’s probably to save bandwidth and storage on site, so makes sense.

What graphics cards do AI upscaling on videos?

No they didn't.

Microsoft added AI upscaling to Xbox cloud streaming on Edge and it works really well. At least I think it's AI upscaling, it could be something like FSR. Either way it looks really good. If Microsoft can do it for lag sensitive gaming then Google can do it for regular videos.

> other people also running 109.0.5414.75 (Official Build) (64-bit) (cohort: Stable) do not see this behaviour

Might be A/B testing for now.

That's just the way they talk. One popular youtuber does it so everybody does it. It's like radio voice or news anchor voice.

No you don’t understand. When working with machine learning for long enough, you start to recognize what the artifacts and errors sound snd look like.

Ok so I'm not losing my mind, I think I got this recently too.

Could be from simple upscaling techniques (e.g. bilinear interpolation) combined with antialiasing. CNNs don't seem feasible given the compute power needed for the number of users using YouTube.

do you have images of "baseline" compression artifacts to compare this against?

Testing features with sub groups of users before fully rolling out is common practice at Google, I’d imagine that’s what’s going on. Cool stuff

It doesn't make any sense to run neural network on the client side at all. Youtube takes a moment to process your video before it gets uploaded, which is probably when their deep learning algorithms get to work. After that you just save the frames and don't run the neural networks again.

This is a valid guess because it takes a lot longer to upload a video on Youtube in comparison to other platforms that do no checks at all.

> Dedicated graphics is completely idle during this.

Are you sure fixed function decoder/upscale stuff is reported in GPU utilization graphs?

Not in Task Manager, but at least something would show up in GPU-Z like a clock increase over idle, memory bus usage, GPU utilisation, thermals, power draw, etc etc.