Faster games for everyone? Microsoft’s DirectSR could be the scaling breakthrough PC gamers have been praying for
Microsoft is preparing a new technology for PC gamers called DirectSR (DirectX Super Resolution, apparently) which will be revealed at GDC 2024 next month. The revelation came from VideoCardzwho found the details of a session at the game Developers Conference on March 21, where Microsoft will provide an overview of DirectSR (with an AMD and […]
Microsoft is preparing a new technology for PC gamers called DirectSR (DirectX Super Resolution, apparently) which will be revealed at GDC 2024 next month.
The revelation came from VideoCardzwho found the details of a session at the game Developers Conference on March 21, where Microsoft will provide an overview of DirectSR (with an AMD and Nvidia engineer involved in the presentation).
So the key question here, obviously, is: what exactly is DirectSR? Well, no real details are provided about the nature of the technology in the session blurb.
This looks like an upscaling trick a la Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR (or even Intel XeSS), but these are targeted features that require built-in support by the game developer (or modders , in some games – but it gets wonky in these unofficial ones). case).
What seems most likely is that DirectSR will be some sort of global scaling technology, so it could be a feature similar to AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution (RSR). Or some sort of method to make it easier to scale PC games more broadly, regardless of what GPU you have.
Analysis: Scaling Puzzle
So we can’t be sure what DirectSR will actually be, but we can hope that it will be an important piece of the puzzle in bringing wider scaling, and therefore higher frame rates. fast, to a wider selection of games.
What’s also interesting here is whether this is related to another recent leak, in which an “Auto Super Resolution” feature was discovered hidden in test builds of Windows 11.
Could this be related to DirectSR? Well, maybe it could be down to timing, as it looks like auto super resolution will be a widely applicable scaling feature for games (and maybe more) that use AI. (Either hardware integrated into the GPU, like Nvidia’s Tensor cores on RTX graphics cards, or an NPU or neural processing unit, which are now bolted to CPUs like Meteor Lake chips).
Either way, there are more and more suggestions that exciting things are brewing for Windows 11 gamers. In theory, automatic super resolution could debut with Windows 11 24H2, although as it isn’t even being tested yet, we need to be careful before jumping to conclusions.
Looking forward to GDC 2024 to learn more about DirectSR and exactly where it fits into the broader game scaling puzzle.
