How to Improve PC Graphics and Add Filters With Nvidia Freestyle

The war between video card manufacturers has never been more fraught. Nvidia and AMD, the two primary GPU heavyweights, are constantly striving to produce more efficient, powerful, and versatile cards than their competition. Meanwhile, newcomers like Intel with its Arc GPU are eager to muscle into an already saturated marketplace.

One of the most interesting facets of this conflict isn’t the hardware itself, but the suite of features each company is producing to get an edge over its rivals. This includes developments like ray tracing, but also software like AMD’s Radeon Image Sharpening and Nvidia Freestyle. But what is Freestyle, and how does it work?

What Is Nvidia Freestyle?

(Credit: Nvidia)

Put simply, Nvidia Freestyle is a collection of post-processing effects users can apply like a coat of paint over rendered graphics before they’re delivered to your monitor. It allows you to dramatically change the way games look.

Find yourself in a poorly lit area, or playing a darker game that doesn’t have built-in brightness settings? One of Freestyle’s many filters allows you to significantly brighten up games (without the washed-out effect some third-party software applies via gamma). Or maybe you want to make a game look more photorealistic. Freestyle allows you to tweak things like color, saturation, and contrast to make graphics look closer to reality than their default appearance.

Freestyle also has a number of practical applications, and can help improve accessibility in games that are lacking sufficient options. Colorblind gamers can adjust the palettes of their favorite games to make it easier to distinguish between colors.

One common complaint amongst colorblind gamers is that it can be difficult to see key features like attack templates, the radius a grenade will effect, or other AoE indicators, because they blend into the ground or nearby textures. Freestyle allows you to alter the color of these indicators so they stand out more clearly and draw the eye, even in the middle of a frantic firefight. 

(Credit: Nvidia)

There’s also a handy night mode, which Nvidia says reduces the amount of blue light your display emits. Blue light has been linked to sleep disruption, so toggling this on while you’re gaming before bed could improve your sleep quality or help you fall asleep more quickly. 

Of course, there are also a number of effects built purely for fun or to satisfy your inner aesthete. Apply a sepia toned filter to your favorite World War II shooter to get an authentic Ken Burns experience, or try the Painterly filter to apply a blurred, cel-shaded cartoon filter. There are a huge number options to play with, including the following standouts:

• Black and White: Perfect for making Cyberpunk 2077 feel like a noir.

• Details: Adjust clarity, sharpness, HDR tone and bloom to pick out key features or textures.

• Letterbox: Get that cinema house experience out of in-game cutscenes by adding horizontal bars to the top and bottom of the screen.

• Old Film: A step beyond black and white, this filter also adds film grain and “dirt” to capture the look of a degrading film reel.

• Sharpen/Sharpen+: Much like Nvidia’s Image Sharpening tool, this filter makes images crisper, counteracting the effect of anti-aliasing, which can blur the edges of objects and characters. Sharpen+ goes even further by also impacting texture details.

• Splitscreen: Divide the screen vertically to display two identical versions of a scene.

• Tiltshift: Play with blur and the focal plane to make scenes look like dioramas or toy boxes.

Freestyle filters in Ark: Survival Evolved (Credit: Nvidia)

Freestyle works hand-in-hand with Nvidia’s Ansel photography mode to take Instagram-worthy snaps without the necessity of a game including a dedicated photo mode. And because it’s a post-processing effect, the impact on performance is very minimal. That said, some of the filters are more demanding than others, so you may start dropping frames after applying the Painterly filter, for example. Keep in mind that the exact impact will also depend on the game being altered.

With a huge number of filters and a large toolbox of sliders to adjust, the number of potential visual effects is staggering. The best way to find out what works best for each game is to jump in and start experimenting yourself, though there are also a number of threads and resources online where users share some of their favorite filter combinations on a game-by-game basis.

How to Enable Nvidia Freestyle

To enable Freestyle, you’ll need to turn it on in GeForce Experience or the new Nvidia app, which consolidates the global settings from Control Panel with the driver update and individual game tweaks available in the Experience app. Though it’s been available to users for several years now, Nvidia still considers Freestyle an “experimental” feature, so you need to jump through a few hoops to get it running. However, once it has been enabled, the filters are a breeze to apply and tweak.

The new Nvidia app (Credit: Nvidia)

If you’re willing to try the new Nvidia app, which is still in beta, download the app. You’ll want to click on the Settings option in the sidebar. Then, scroll down through your PC specs to the Features section. Here, you can toggle on the Overlay, and then flip on Game filters and Photo mode, which covers all of the Freestyle features.

For those still using the GeForce Experience app, navigate over to the settings menu (the gear icon near the top right of the interface). Inside the settings menu, find the Enable experimental features box under the About section and toggle it on. Note that the GeForce Experience version of this feature will not save your Freestyle settings if you install a new driver.

The old GeForce Experience app (Credit: Nvidia)

Now anytime you launch a supported game, you’ll be able to press Alt + F3 or hit Alt + Z and select Game filter to open up the Freestyle menu. You can then apply as many filters as you want applied at once, and tweak them with the included sliders to see in real-time how the graphics are affected. Freestyle even provides three separate profiles per game, so you can set up multiple suites of filters and flip between them at will.

Freestyle menu as seen in Doom Eternal (Credit: Whitson Gordon)

If you’re using Freestyle through the new Nvidia App, you may notice some new options that weren’t previously available. The App has added a new AI-powered filters powered by the Tensor Cores on RTX cards:

• RTX Dynamic Vibrance: A new take on the Digital Vibrance feature that’s been kicking around on the Control Panel for some time now. It’s designed to enhance color and fine tune color balance, to avoid crushing and preserve image quality.

• RTX HDR: Put simply, RTX HDR is designed to add HDR to games that don’t support it by default (according to Nvidia, only 10 of the top 50 most-played GeForce games currently offer native HDR support), to increase the contrast between black and white and improve the color gamut for more vivid, color-accurate images.

Bear in mind that Freestyle only works with supported games, so your game will need to be on their list to work. Unsupported games won’t even allow you to call up Freestyle, so if you want to check if a game is supported on the fly, just tap Alt-F3 while the game is running.

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