As this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) fast approaches, we're starting to see teasers and previews of what might be discussed at the sessions beginning on March 18. We'd already spotted and its announcement of a preview to something called DirectSR, which we speculated to be a new hardware-agnostic upscaler, and guess what? Microsoft has confirmed that this isn't quite the case, but [[link]] something that might be [[link]] even more useful.
In a post on the , Microsoft has discussed further details around DirectSR, describing it as "the missing link developers have been waiting for" in regards to integrating Super Resolution features (more generally referred to as upscalers) into DirectX games.
Nvidia took its own bite of this particular cherry back in 2022 with an open-source solution called , which in this case acted as a plug-and-play solution to interface between a game and the rendering API and add upscalers into the rendering path, including both DirectX and Vulcan support.
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However, because AMD didn't add FSR support (despite the door being left open for it as 'Hardware Vendor #3' in the open-source app), many developers chose to simply use the DLSS API by itself.
Given that DirectSR is an API directly from Microsoft's DirectX team, this particular bridge between supported games and a variety of upscalers looks like it will provide a more universal solution, which is good news for those of us that like to have a fiddle around in the graphics setting menu to find the best balance of performance and image quality for our particular machines.
More choice is usually a good thing, after all, and if DirectSR proves to be the missing link Microsoft says it is, perhaps the days of universal upscaler support becoming the norm are not too far away after all.