TECH NEWS – The name has been on the Game Developers Conference (GDC) schedule for about a month now, but now we know more about what kind of scaling technology we can expect from the Redmond-based company.

Direct SuperResolution is an attempt to make it easier to implement upscalers, and has been created in partnership with all the major CPU and GPU manufacturers (Nvidia, AMD, Intel). Shawn Hargreaves, development manager of Microsoft’s Direct3D division, demonstrated the technology at the GDC. According to him, PC versions of games are expected to support multiple upscaling technologies at the same time (Starfield, for example, had a minor scandal over its lack of support), and platforms want to be able to introduce newer, more advanced technology in games that are already released. This is what Microsoft is trying to do.

DirectSR is a new DirectX API that abstracts all the rendering technologies into a standard interface. Built-in variants will come as part of DirectSR and will be usable on all hardware, others will be applicable to specific GPU/NPU hardware. Developers can choose which ones to use. Microsoft’s DirectSR will submit to an application-provided compute queue for execution, with the UI rendered over the top and then presented as normal. Since AMD has created FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2) as a general purpose shader program that will work on any graphics card that supports Computer Shader 6.2, Microsoft has integrated it into the DirectSR runtime so that if developers provide the parameters and pre-processing, FSR 2 will work by default without writing any separate code.

Nvidia’s DLSS is also easy to integrate if developers provide the algorithm with a few common inputs (source color image, source depth, source image region (optional), motion vectors, motion vector scale, camera jitter, exposure and pre-exposure, exposure scale texture, ignore history mask, reactive mask, sharpness, image regions).

There will be a public preview in the Agility SDK, but it’s not clear when DirectSR will be released.

Source WCCFTech ()