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NVIDIA Ansel

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NVIDIA Ansel
Information
Type In-game photography tool
Industry Video games
Developer NVIDIA
Supported Devices NVIDIA GeForce GPUs from the Kepler architecture onward; Ansel RTX features on GeForce RTX 20 series and later
Release Date May 6, 2016 (announced); July 14, 2016 (first supported game)


NVIDIA Ansel is an in-game photography tool made by NVIDIA for PC games running on its GeForce graphics cards. In a game that supports it, Ansel pauses the action and lets the player move a free camera, apply filters and save captures far above the screen's resolution, including HDR images and 360-degree panoramas in mono or stereo that can be viewed in VR headsets.[1][2] The name refers to the landscape photographer Ansel Adams.[3]

NVIDIA announced Ansel alongside the GeForce GTX 1080 in May 2016, and the first game to support it, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, received it on July 14, 2016.[1][4] Games must integrate the Ansel SDK to get the full feature set, and plugins were released for Unreal Engine and Unity.[5][6] In 2018 and 2019 NVIDIA added Ansel RTX, which raises ray tracing quality for still captures and brought a subset of Ansel features to games without SDK integration.[7][8] NVIDIA now calls the feature "Photo Mode" on its website. When it replaced GeForce Experience with the NVIDIA app in 2024, it dropped the 360-degree and stereo capture modes, the captures intended for viewing in virtual reality headsets.[9]

Reviewed 21 October 2026. All dates, figures, names and quotes checked against the cited NVIDIA, Road to VR, Engadget, UploadVR, PC Perspective, Wccftech, Guru3D, ComputerBase, HEXUS, Tom's Hardware and Unity Asset Store pages, plus the redirects of NVIDIA's former Ansel pages. About review dates.

History

Announcement (2016)

NVIDIA introduced Ansel on May 6, 2016, the day it revealed the GeForce GTX 1080. Its announcement post, written by Andrew Burnes, listed a free camera, super-resolution capture, post-process filters, OpenEXR capture and 360-degree capture as the main features. It named The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Fortnite, Paragon, Unreal Tournament, Obduction, The Witness, LawBreakers, Tom Clancy's The Division and No Man's Sky as games where support was "coming soon", without giving a release date.[1] Engadget reported that one photo shown from the stage at the launch event was 61,440 pixels wide, and that 360-degree stereoscopic images could be taken with one click.[3]

NVIDIA's blog post said Ansel would work on GTX 600-series cards and newer, while its press briefing mentioned only the Maxwell and Pascal architectures; PC Perspective's Scott Michaud pointed out the difference at the time.[5] NVIDIA had first aimed for "one line of code" per game, but PC Perspective reported that integration grew to about a hundred lines: roughly 40 for The Witness and a reported 150 extra lines for The Witcher 3. Because NVIDIA draws the Ansel interface, the sliders and options are the same in every game. PC Perspective wrote that requiring the developer to build Ansel into the game was mostly meant to stop players from cheating or seeing hidden parts of the world.[5]

Launch and engine plugins (2016-2017)

Ansel became usable on July 14, 2016, when NVIDIA released the GeForce 368.81 WHQL driver, which supported Ansel in Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Wccftech called Mirror's Edge Catalyst "the first game to utilize this tech", and the Ansel interface opened with Alt+F2 during play.[4][10] The same driver release was aimed at VR titles, including NVIDIA VR Funhouse.[10] In an October 2016 hands-on, ComputerBase described Ansel as part of GeForce Experience 3.0, said it required a Kepler-based GeForce GTX card, with NVIDIA naming the GTX 650 as the minimum, and noted that only four games supported it at that point: The Witcher 3, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, The Witness and ARK: Survival Evolved. On a Full HD display the preset maximum was 63,360 x 35,640 pixels, assembled from 4,225 individual shots, and the article's headline cited a file size of 565 MB for such a photo.[11]

At Unite LA in November 2016, NVIDIA and Unity announced a partnership to bring NVIDIA GameWorks technologies to Unity developers, starting with VRWorks and Ansel. NVIDIA said free plugins would appear on the Unity Asset Store, with Ansel as the first.[12] Unreal Engine 4.14, released in November 2016, added Ansel as a plugin.[13]

At the Game Developers Conference in March 2017, NVIDIA announced a free public Ansel SDK that any developer could add to a game, and said Amazon Lumberyard would integrate Ansel.[14] NVIDIA's developer post said the plugin had been available to Unreal and Unity developers "for a few months" and that the SDK was now released with source code; it named Paragon and For Honor as the most recent games to add support.[6]

GeForce Experience updates and Ansel RTX (2018-2019)

At CES 2018, NVIDIA said that "millions of shots" had been taken in 36 supported games. GeForce Experience 3.12 refreshed the Ansel overlay, added eight filters, allowed several filters to be combined, and added a "Photo Mode" button to the Alt+Z share overlay alongside the existing Alt+F2 hotkey.[15]

In August 2018 NVIDIA announced Ansel RTX for the GeForce RTX 20 series. In a supported ray-traced game, pausing with Ansel RTX raises the amount of ray tracing "beyond real-time levels" for the still image; for Assetto Corsa Competizione, NVIDIA quoted 10 times the refractions per pixel, 12 times the ambient occlusion samples, 32 times the shadow samples and 40 times the reflection samples. The same update added AI Up-Res, which uses Tensor cores, EXR capture of HDR buffers, and Green Screen, Sticker and Letterbox filters. A subset of the new features was to work in games that had not integrated the SDK.[7]

GeForce Experience 3.16 offered this expanded feature set as an experimental beta for "hundreds of games", with stackable filters, HDR saving and up to 8K screenshots produced with AI on GeForce RTX GPUs.[16] NVIDIA officially released these features in GeForce Experience 3.18 on March 19, 2019, saying the photo tool then supported more than 200 games. It noted that the available features "varies by game and whether the game has integrated the" SDK, and that 22 games had added support for its photo tool, ShadowPlay Highlights or both over the previous six months, among them Hitman 2, Battlefield V, Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.[8]

Rename and the NVIDIA app (2024-present)

NVIDIA's current web pages call the tool "Photo Mode", including the original 2016 announcement and the 2019 Ansel RTX article, whose web addresses still contain the word "ansel".[1][8] When NVIDIA opened the beta of the NVIDIA app on February 22, 2024, it listed "Photo Mode 360 & Stereo captures" among features it was discontinuing because they were "underutilized, especially where good alternatives exist".[9] The NVIDIA app left beta on November 12, 2024. Tom's Hardware reported that its overlay includes a photo mode, and quoted NVIDIA as saying that GeForce Experience "can still be used, but we will not be adding new features or addressing bugs".[17] As of October 2026, NVIDIA's former Ansel product page redirects to the NVIDIA app page, and the developer.nvidia.com/ansel address forwards to that former product page.[18] The NVIDIA Ansel plugin on the Unity Asset Store is marked as deprecated: it can no longer be bought and is no longer supported by its publisher, although existing owners can keep using it.[19]

Date Event
May 6, 2016 Announced with the GeForce GTX 1080[1]
July 14, 2016 First release, in Mirror's Edge Catalyst, with driver 368.81[4]
November 2016 Unity Asset Store plugin announced at Unite LA; plugin added in Unreal Engine 4.14[12][13]
March 2017 Public SDK announced at GDC; Lumberyard integration announced[14]
January 2018 GeForce Experience 3.12: new overlay, eight new filters, stackable filters[15]
August 2018 Ansel RTX announced for GeForce RTX 20 series[7]
March 19, 2019 Expanded feature set officially released in GeForce Experience 3.18[8]
February 22, 2024 NVIDIA app beta; 360 and stereo captures discontinued[9]
November 12, 2024 NVIDIA app 1.0; GeForce Experience becomes legacy software[17]

Features

When a player opens Ansel, the game pauses and a free camera becomes available that can be moved, rolled and zoomed; developers can limit camera movement, for example in multiplayer games.[1] PC Perspective reported that Ansel can read the game's depth, normal and color buffers, which allows more complex filters than a simple overlay.[5]

Capture mode Description
Screenshot A standard 2D capture of the composed shot, with filters applied[1]
Super resolution Captures "tens of thousands of pixels in size"; NVIDIA's example measured 46080x25920 and took 1.7 GB[1]
360 A 360-degree panorama stitched automatically in mono[20]
Stereo and 360 stereo Stereoscopic captures, including stereo 360-degree panoramas for VR viewing[1][20]
EXR / HDR OpenEXR files whose exposure can be chosen later in an image editor[1]

Sources gave different maximum sizes. UploadVR quoted "up to 32x your game's resolution, or 8-Gigapixels", while PC Perspective reported a maximum of 4.5 gigapixels.[20][5] PC Perspective described the 360-degree output as an equirectangular "photo-bubble"; see equirectangular projection.[5]

Post-process filters at launch covered brightness, vignette, sketch, color enhancement and special effects, and users could write and share their own effects.[1] Later versions added stackable filters, AI Up-Res on GeForce RTX cards and the Green Screen, Sticker and Letterbox filters.[15][7]

Use in virtual reality

Ansel's connection to VR is its 360-degree output. Mono and stereo panoramas captured from desktop games could be viewed in VR headsets, and NVIDIA promoted them as "Virtual Reality 360°" photos.[15][20] For Google Cardboard, NVIDIA released an Android app, NVIDIA VR Viewer, which came with sample 360-degree captures. Road to VR's instructions called for an Android phone running Lollipop or later with at least 2 GB of RAM.[1][2] For the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, Road to VR suggested copying the images to a PC and opening them in Virtual Desktop's photo viewer. Ben Lang called the quality of the 360 3D captures "very impressive".[2] ComputerBase's October 2016 test found side-by-side viewing in Cardboard to be of rather poor quality and recommended Virtual Desktop to owners of the Vive and Rift.[11] Engadget noted that phone users without a Cardboard viewer could also open the images as motion-tracked 2D panoramas.[3]

Ansel reached Unity through the same 2016 partnership that brought VRWorks to the engine.[12] Stereo and 360-degree capture is not part of the photo mode in the NVIDIA app; NVIDIA dropped it during the move from GeForce Experience.[9]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 Andrew Burnes (2016-05-06). "NVIDIA Photo Mode: Revolutionizing Screenshot Capture For GeForce GTX Gamers". NVIDIA GeForce News. NVIDIA. https://www.nvidia.com/en-sg/geforce/news/ansel-revolutionizing-game-screenshots. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Ben Lang (2016-05-07). "Preview NVIDIA's Impressive 'Ansel' 360 3D Screenshots in Rift, Vive, and Cardboard". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/preview-nvidia-ansel-360-3d-vr-screenshots-oculus-rift-htc-vive-google-cardboard/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Timothy J. Seppala (2016-05-06). "NVIDIA brings in-game photography to the masses with 'Ansel'". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2016/05/06/nvidia-ansel-photo-mode/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Hassan Mujtaba (2016-07-14). "NVIDIA GeForce 368.81 WHQL Drivers Released For Virtual Reality Gamers - NVIDIA Ansel and VR Funhouse Also Launched". Wccftech. https://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-368-81-whql-ansel-launch/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Scott Michaud (2016-05-17). "A New Focus on NVIDIA's Ansel". PC Perspective. https://pcper.com/2016/05/a-new-focus-on-nvidias-ansel/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Capturing and Sharing the Art of Games". NVIDIA Developer. NVIDIA. https://developer.nvidia.com/capturing-and-sharing-art-games. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Mark Tyson (2018-08-23). "Nvidia introduces Ansel RTX screenshot technology". HEXUS. https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/121415-nvidia-introduces-ansel-rtx-screenshot-technology/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Andrew Burnes (2019-03-19). "GeForce Experience Adds New Creative Tools With NVIDIA Freestyle and Photo Mode RTX, Bringing Photo Mode Support To Over 200 Games". NVIDIA GeForce News. NVIDIA. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/gfecnt/geforce-experience-update-ansel-rtx-freestyle-out-now/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Henry Lin (2024-02-22). "Test Drive The New NVIDIA App Beta: The Essential Companion For PC Gamers & Creators". NVIDIA GeForce News. NVIDIA. https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/news/nvidia-app-beta-download/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Hilbert Hagedoorn (2016-07-14). "Download GeForce 368.81 WHQL driver". Guru3D. https://www.guru3d.com/story/download-geforce-368-81-whql-driver/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Robert Kern (2016-10-16). "Nvidia Ansel ausprobiert: 565 MB für ein Foto mit 63.360 × 35.640 Pixel". ComputerBase. https://www.computerbase.de/2016-10/nvidia-ansel-ausprobiert/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Alessio Palumbo (2016-11-04). "NVIDIA & Unity Partner to Bring GameWorks (Starting with VR Works & Ansel) to Developers". Wccftech. https://wccftech.com/nvidia-unity-partner-vr-works-ansel/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Scott Michaud (2016-11-15). "Epic Games Releases Unreal Engine 4.14". PC Perspective. https://pcper.com/2016/11/epic-games-releases-unreal-engine-4-14/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Wolfgang Andermahr (2017-03-01). "GeForce Experience: Shadowplay wird Highlights und Ansel wird Public". ComputerBase. https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/ansel-shadowplay-highlights/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 "NVIDIA Freestyle: Customize A Game's Look In Real-Time". NVIDIA GeForce News. NVIDIA. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/gfecnt/nvidia-freestyle-ansel-enhancements-geforce-experience-article/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  16. ↑ "Test drive the beta Photo Mode RTX features". GeForce Experience release notes. NVIDIA. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/release-notes/GFE/3_16_0/Rich/gfe-v3_16_0-rich-release-highlights/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Aaron Klotz (2024-11-12). "Nvidia App reaches version 1.0 milestone and exits beta: GeForce Experience and Control Panel now deprecated". Tom's Hardware. Yahoo Tech. https://tech.yahoo.com/apps/articles/nvidia-app-reaches-version-1-140055064.html. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  18. ↑ "NVIDIA App". NVIDIA. NVIDIA. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/software/nvidia-app/. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  19. ↑ "NVIDIA Ansel". Unity Asset Store. Unity Technologies. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/camera/nvidia-ansel-74758. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 20.3 Jason Evangelho (2016-05-06). "Nvidia Ansel Automatically Converts Your In-Game Screenshots To 8-Gigapixel 360 Photos". UploadVR. https://uploadvr.com/nvidia-ansel-game-screenshots-steroids-converts-shareable-360-photos. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
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