Microsoft Announces DirectSR for Video Game Scaling

Microsoft is partnering with AMD and Nvidia to bring a new video game API to Windows that will enable Super Resolution (SR) graphics scaling. It’s called DirectSR, and it’s been an open secret for the past month or so.

“We’re thrilled to announce DirectSR, our new API designed in partnership with GPU hardware vendors to enable seamless integration of Super Resolution (SR) into the next generation of games,” Microsoft’s Joshua Tucker writes in the DirectX Developer Blog. “Super Resolution is a cutting-edge technique that increases the resolution and visual quality in games. DirectSR is the missing link developers have been waiting for when approaching SR integration, providing a smoother, more efficient experience that scales across hardware.”

As noted the other day, Microsoft will be discussing DirectSR in more detail at next month’s Game Developers Conference (GDC), where it will provide the API’s first public preview during the DirectX State of the Union talk. But we’ve also seen hints of this technology in Windows Insider builds, where it’s been referred to as an “automatic super resolution” capability. It’s likely these previous disclosures triggered this placeholder explanation blog post.

But it does provide more detail, too. DirectSR “increases the resolution and visual quality in games,” Tucker says, “providing a smoother, more efficient experience that scales across hardware.” Like previous DirectX APIs, DirectSR abstracts the underlying hardware so that it can work across GPU architectures, meaning it will work with different vendors’ graphics card, in this case tying together previously separate efforts like Nvidia DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, and Intel XeSS.

DirectSR will be available soon in a public preview.