Microsoft will be introducing a new super-resolution feature at this year’s Game Developers Conference happening in March. A posting on the GDC website shows that Microsoft will be introducing DirectSR during its DirectX State of the Union showcase which will also feature work graphs for assisting developers working with technology from key partners AMD and NVIDIA. Oddly enough Intel was left off the session description but has been acknowledged as a key partner by Microsoft in a previous announcement on its DirectX developer blog regarding Neural Processing Units (NPUs), a major component used in the push for AI in desktops and laptops.
Per Microsoft (via GDC 2024 session viewer):
“The DirectX team will showcase the latest updates, demos, and best practices for game development with key partners from AMD and NVIDIA. Work graphs are the newest way to take full advantage of GPU hardware and parallelize workloads. Microsoft will provide a preview into DirectSR, making it easier than ever for game devs to scale super resolution support across Windows devices. Finally, dive into the latest tooling updates for PIX.”
It is already being speculated that DirectSR could be Microsoft’s attempt a creating a standardized form of super resolution upscaling technology that could be integrated at a software level with DirectX. This frees developers from having to create separate pipelines in supporting NVIDIA DLSS which is currently restricted to its RTX GPUs, and then AMD FSR and Intel Xess, both of which can be used with any modern graphics card. However, developers currently must implement each manually to utilize and each has its pros and cons.
Auto SR
It was only a couple of weeks ago when a member of the Windows Insider Program discovered a new toggle called Automatic SR (Auto SR) in the Windows 11 system>graphics>display settings menu. Not much was said about the new feature. It was reported then that toggling the feature seemed to have no effect but was also speculated that could be due to it needing a CPU with NPU for AI-assisted processing. Hopefully, Microsoft will shed more light on this feature when it introduces DirectSR on March 21, as the two could possibly work hand-in-hand.