NVIDIA Ansel is the first in-game camera system to craft the perfect screenshot

Posted on Monday, May 09 2016 @ 13:44 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
One of the interesting things NVIDIA revealed during the Pascal launch event was a new tool named Ansel.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang described it as the first in-game camera system, it goes way beyond taking a typical screenshot as Ansel will enable you to craft the perfect screenshot via the use of 360-degrees camera movement, adjustable field-of-view (FOV) and post-process filters (including HDR).

Furthermore, Ansel will enable you to take screenshots at resolutions in the tens of thousands of pixels in size. The only catch is that games need to receive support for Ansel, but NVIDIA claims the technology is soon coming to a number of top games, including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Epic Games' Fortnite, Paragon and Unreal Tournament, Cyan Worlds' Obduction, Thekla’s The Witness, Boss Key Productions’ Lawbreakers, Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, and No Man’s Sky from Hello Games.
Free Camera - Compose Your Shot, Anywhere, From Any Angle
Start your game photography career by activating Ansel, at which time the game will be paused, and a freecam enabled, allowing you to compose your scene and take unlimited high-quality shots until you achieve that perfect image. In other words, you can escape the confines of a game’s first or third person camera and take a screenshot from any angle, until you have the perfect shot.

Roll, zoom, and reposition - do whatever you like to achieve the perfect game photo that real-life photographers may only get once in a lifetime. With this functionality Ansel instantly overcomes the limitations of traditional game capture, enabling you to capture any type of screenshot you can imagine.

Game developers, of course, will have the ability to restrict camera movement in multi-player games so Ansel users don’t gain an unfair advantage through use of the feature.

Super Resolution - Capture Every Detail With Gigapixel Images
Once you’ve positioned and framed your shot, simply select “High Resolution” in the Ansel in-game overlay and you can capture screenshots tens of thousands of pixels in size. Ordinarily this would be impossible given the resources required to capture such a high resolution screenshot, but by using the CUDA Cores present on NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs we can render and save these screenshots with ease via an in-game overlay.

These super resolution screenshots can be viewed in Irfanview and other applications, and shared online via file sharing sites, forums, or any other service that supports the uploading of large files.

But why would you want to capture screenshots at super resolutions tens of thousands of pixels in size? Well, the resulting screenshot is almost entirely free of aliasing, detail is significantly sharper and clear, crops of any part of the screenshot are at maximum fidelity levels, and screenshots can be downsampled to lower resolutions for wall prints, posters, or super high-quality desktop wallpapers.

By saving at such a high resolution you can view incredible amounts of detail in games - take The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt screenshot below, for instance. In that image, Geralt of Rivia’s eye is less than a pixel in size, yet we can zoom in and see his eye and entire face in full detail. Below Geralt is another room that players pass through at the start of the game - by zooming in there we can read the words in the books in full detail.
NVIDIa Ansel

NVIDIA Ansel Super Res


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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