Over the past few years, Nvidia, AMD, and Intel have been putting in their own version of super resolution graphics support for their GPUs to improve the visuals on PC games while also increasing their frame rates. Nvidia has DLSS, AMD has FidelityFX, and Intel has XeSS.
However, game developers who wish to support these super resolution standards have had to add them as separate APIs in their PC titles. Today, Microsoft announced a new solution for PC developers who are creating Direct X 12-based games that should make it much easier to support multiple SR standards.
In a blog post, Microsoft announced the first preview version of the new DirectSR API. Microsoft worked with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel to create a new standard that should work across their GPU hardware. Developers can get it with the Agility SDK 1.714.0-preview release with full developer specs on its GitHub page.
Microsoft stated:
DirectSR enables multi-vendor SR through a common set of inputs and outputs, allowing a single code path to exercise DLSS Super Resolution, FidelityFX Super Resolution, and XeSS. By exposing these technologies under one interface, SR integration becomes straightforward and scalable – developers can implement once and ship SR across the broad landscape of Windows devices!
DirectSR has been developed as a stand-alone solution for Direct X 12 game developers. That means they can no longer have to put in "vendor-specific SDKs or package vendor-specific libraries." There"s no word yet on how long DirectSR will stay in its current preview version.
Microsoft says it is shipping the first preview of DirectSR with built-in support for AMD"s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2. AMD has posted its own blog entry on how this support was enabled. Driver-level support for DirectSR has been put into Nvidia"s GPUs, with GeForce RTX 20 and above chips and its 560.38 driver version.
Driver-level support has also been enabled for Intel"s integrated GPUs found in its 11th-gen Intel Core processors and above, along with its Intel Arc GPUs with its latest 31.0.101.5534 drivers.