Microsoft is the latest company to hop onto the video upscaling train. According to a new post on the Microsoft Edge Insider site, the company has launched Video Super Resolution, a new feature in preview for Edge browsers that, similar to NVIDIA’s RTX Video Super Resolution, uses AI to improve the quality of low-resolution videos. Unlike green team’s option, Microsoft’s Video Super Resolution can be used by both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon GPU users.
From a Microsoft Edge Insider post:
We are excited to introduce an experimental video enhancement experience, powered by AI technology from Microsoft research called Video Super Resolution. It is a technology that uses machine learning to enhance the quality of any video watched in a browser. It accomplishes this by removing blocky compression artifacts and upscaling video resolution so you can enjoy crisp and clear videos on YouTube, and other streaming platforms that play video content without sacrificing bandwidth no matter the original video resolution.
Due to the computation power required to cleanup and upscale videos, video super resolution (VSR) is currently offered only when the following conditions are met:
- The device has one of the following GPUs: Nvidia RTX 20/30/40 series OR AMD RX5700-RX7800 series GPUs.
- The video is played at less than 720p resolution.
- The device is connected to AC power.
- Both the height and width of the video are greater than 192 pixels.
- The video is not protected with Digital Rights Management technologies like PlayReady or Widevine. Frames from these protected videos are not accessible to the browser for processing.
- We are working on automatic Hybrid GPU support for laptops with multiple GPUs. Meanwhile, you can try VSR by changing Windows settings to force Edge to run on your discrete GPU.
The feature is currently available in the Canary channel for 50% of users and will be enabled when the above conditions are met. When the feature is enabled, you will see an HD icon in the address bar. Clicking the icon will allow you to enable or disable the feature.
If you would like the try the feature out manually, you can enable the feature in edge://flags/#edge-video-super-resolution