After Nvidia successfully introduced and popularized its DLSS image upscaling technology, others soon followed with their own upscalers, which arguably made the lives of game developers harder, trying to support AMD's FSR, Intel's XeSS, and Nvidia's DLSS. But it looks like the situation may be getting better, as Microsoft is about to roll out its DirectSR image upscaling technology at the Game Developers Conference 2024 next month.
Microsoft's DirectSR aims to standardize upscaling methods for Windows gaming PCs, and has been co-developed with AMD and Nvidia. Microsoft is set to present its DirectSR on March 21, together with AMD and Nvidia during the DirectX State of the Union session, which will be presented by Shawn Hargreaves (Microsoft), Austin Kinross (Microsoft), Wessam Bahnassi (Nvidia), and Rob Martin (AMD).
The introduction of the DirectSR technology marks Microsoft's first foray into the upscaling domain. The presentation will showcase the technology's capabilities and demonstrate how Microsoft has collaborated with AMD and Nvidia to create a standardized approach to integrating upscaling technology into games. This collaboration aims to provide developers with a unified set of resources for enhancing the visual quality of games, without performance degradation.
"The DirectX team will showcase the latest updates, demos, and best practices for game development with key partners from AMD and Nvidia," the description of the session reads. "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."
While the specifics of the DirectSR technology remain under wraps, it will likely be made in a way that it is going to work on the majority of graphics processors in use today. As a result, it will unlikely use certain proprietary hardware capabilities of AMD's or Nvidia's GPUs. To that end, it should work equally well on Radeon and GeForce graphics cards. What remains to be seen is whether it will work flawlessly on Intel Arc GPUs as well.
The upcoming introduction of an industry-standard upscaling technology is a big deal and should be good news for gamers and the industry as it will, at least to a degree, eliminate competition between AMD's FSR and Nvidia's DLSS and will make lives of game developers a bit easier.
