NVIDIA rolled out two new Shield TV devices very recently, including the regular Shield TV and Shield TV Pro. On paper, they aren't drastically different devices; they still have fairly similar hardware to the previous generation Shield TV from 2017, although the non-Pro model has a new cylindrical form factor.

One new feature that NVIDIA hyped up was the ability for these devices to do some significantly improved 4K AI upscaling. That feature allows the Shield TV to take regular HD content and upscale it to 4K, which should theoretically do a much better job than your television. But is that feature worth it? Let's talk about it.

What is AI upscaling?

First off, let's talk about what that upscaling actually does.

If you're watching standard 1080p content with a 1920 x 1080 resolution on a 4K television with 3840 x 2160 resolution, that means you're putting about 2 million pixels onto a display that can show about 8 million pixels. Now, with zero upscaling you'd just see a small box of your TV show that only takes up 25% of the center of your screen, surrounded by gigantic black bars on all sides. But obviously that would be a pretty terrible experience, so instead of showing a 1:1 image of a 1080p file, your TV/streaming box tries to “fill in” those remaining 6 million pixels so you get a full-screen image.

That content can be filled in by just stretching out the pixels to fill the screen, which looks terrible, or by upscaling it. Upscaling takes that content and tries to “guess” what the nearby pixels should look like to give you a crisper, clearer image. For the most part now even cheaper TVs and boxes do this reasonably well, but NVIDIA's solution uses AI and machine learning to take significantly more educated guesses about those surrounding pixels. Ideally it should be much better at handling this than your TV, assuming you aren't rocking a Sony Master series or something.

Turn on AI upscaling on the Shield TV

Turning on the upscaling feature is pretty simple, and NVIDIA even has a shortcut front and center for it. All you'll have to do is browse over to the settings menu of the Android TV interface, which can be found at the top right of the home screen.

By default NVIDIA has the AI upscaling shortcut set right in the quick settings section of the settings menu. You can click that to immediately go into the section that will let you turn it on and customize everything.

If you've removed this or don't see it, you can also go into Device Preferences, and Display and Sound to find the standalone entry for AI upscaling.

This will give you a few different options to play around with. There's a demo mode that I fully recommend you turn on and play with, since that will let you see the upscaling in action side-by-side on your regular content. You can also adjust how strong you want the upscaling to be, ranging from a low, basic effect to a high, very processed effect. That one's going to be preference, but in my testing I did prefer the higher settings.

Worth it?

The short answer? Usually, yes, NVIDIA's AI-upscaling does a pretty good job of taking old or lower resolution content and sharpening it to look better on modern TVs. I've tested everything on a Sony Bravia X900F, which is a pretty nice TV that can do its own upscaling reasonably well. NVIDIA still does it better.

But most importantly, it also does it without ruining the image. Sometimes upscaling just oversharpens everything and makes it pretty gross looking, but this machine learning methodology behind the AI upscaling seems like it keeps things looking a little more natural.

Here are three shots using the demo mode on the Shield TV to showcase the difference between AI upscaling and just basic upscaling. This was all done using a 1080p file on a 4K television.

While that's not a drastic difference on something that you're watching in real-time, it's a fairly noticeable improvement! Text especially benefits from this, so if you watch things with a lot of subtitles, you actually probably would immediately see this improve in real-time.

Colors also seem to be a bit sharper sometime, and the overall definition and clarity gets a boost from the higher settings of NVIDIA's upscaling settings.

Of course, not everyone is into that sharpened look. Maybe you don't think this looks good at all, and you'll never turn the feature on. That's okay too!

It's also important to keep in mind that this only works on 1080p and 720p content at 30FPS, so you won't be able to use it on a lot of YouTube videos or things that are already in 4K. But if you do watch a lot of standard 1080p content, then this excellent upscaling might just be enough to tip you over into buying an NVIDIA Shield TV over whatever else you had on your list.

Let us know your thoughts on NVIDIA's AI upscaling in the comments!