Microsoft's DirectSR API is developed based on AMD FSR 2.2.2, which is coming soon

About a month ago, within the framework of the Game Developers Conference 2024 (Game Developers Conference 2024), Microsoft revealed a new technology called Microsoft DirectSR (Direct SuperResolution). As the name suggests, this is an effort to make deploying upgraders easier, and it was built in collaboration with all the major CPU and GPU vendors in the market today. (NVIDIA, AMD and Intel).

After more than a month, Shawn Hargreaves, Development Director of Microsoft's Direct3D division, made the first official detailed introduction to Microsoft DirectSR on March 22. Hargreaves notes that today's PC games are expected to support many out-of-the-box upscaling techniques (obviously it would be a huge miss without tools like AMD FSR or NVIDIA). DLSS in a game, such as with Starfield), as well as the reality of platforms wanting to apply newer, improved techniques to existing games. These are exactly the problems that DirectX is expected to help developers solve effectively.

That's why Microsoft DirectSR, described as the new DirectX API, encapsulates many of the upgrade techniques with a standard interface. Integrated variants will appear as part of Direct SuperResolution and will be used across all hardware, while others will be specific to specific GPU/NPU hardware. All available techniques will be listed, allowing the developer to choose which technique they want. Microsoft DirectSR dispatches execution on the compute queue provided by the application, with the user interface rendered on top and then rendered as normal.

Because AMD Fidelity FX Super Resolution 2 was originally written as a general-purpose shader program and works on any graphics card that supports Computing Shader 6.2. Microsoft has decided to integrate AMD FSR2 core processing into the DirectSR runtime. Therefore, as long as developers prepare the necessary parameters, their games will be able to run seamlessly without the need to write specific FSR2 code.

It will take a long time to deploy Microsoft DirectSR. There's no word yet on when it will be available, but a public preview will be available soon via the Agility SDK.

David Pac

Update 26 March 2024