Microsoft announces DirectSR preview, a new API to standardize upscaling in Windows

Early this year, Microsoft first announced DirectSR to make it easier for game developers to scale super resolution support across Windows devices. Today, Microsoft announced the public preview of DirectSR.

Right now, all major GPU vendors have their own super resolution technologies. So, game developers are forced to implement support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, Intel X^eSS, and NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution. In order to improve the productivity of game developers on Windows, Microsoft is bringing DirectSR as a single API designed to standardize SR support in D3D12 titles through a common set of inputs and outputs.

Here’s how DirectSR will work:

• Native support for DirectSR is provided in GPU drivers, where vendors tune their SR implementation for optimal hardware performance.
• DirectSR includes built-in support for GPU-agnostic variants which are available at the application level.
• DirectSR Preview is shipping with built-in support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.2, along with driver level support for both Intel X^eSS and NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution.
• Allows users to select between the available upscalers at runtime depending on their underlying hardware.
• Game developers need not integrate vendor-specific SDKs or package vendor-specific libraries with their titles.

Download DirectSR supporting SDK and drivers below.

• DirectSR can be downloaded via the Agility SDK 1.714.0-preview release.
• Intel drivers supporting X^eSS via DirectSR, available on Intel integrated GPUs starting from 11th Gen Intel Core processors and discrete Intel Arc Graphics GPUs.
• All NVIDIA display drivers have embedded DLSS Super Resolution available through DirectSR, supported on all NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-Series GPUs and newer.