As this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) approaches, we're starting to see teasers and previews of what might be discussed in sessions starting March 18th. We had already spotted Microsoft's DirectX “State of the Union” and its announcement of a preview of something called DirectSR, which we speculated was a new hardware-agnostic upscaler, and guess what? Microsoft has confirmed that this is not entirely the case, but may be even more useful.
In a contribution to DirectX developer blogMicrosoft has discussed further details about DirectSR, describing it as “the missing link developers have been waiting for” in terms of integrating Super Resolution features (more commonly referred to as upscalers) into DirectX games.
Developed in collaboration with GPU hardware vendors, the new API allows a variety of different upscaling solutions to be enabled via a single code path, including the big names you might expect: Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS are all supported by the new one API rumored to be available soon in the Agility SDK for developers to test and provide feedback.
Upscaler implementation across multiple vendors has been a patchy affair at times, with occasional anomalies, such as AMD partner Starfield not getting FSR 3 and XeSS support until months after launch, and then again after a delayed DLSS 3 release. Integration.
Anything that allows streamlining the process to allow for easier integration of multiple upscalers into DirectX games is beneficial not only for developers, but for anyone hoping to have multiple upscaling options in new and hardware-intensive releases.
Nvidia took its own bite of this particular cherry in 2022 with an open source solution called Nvidia Streamline, 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 DirectX and Vulcan support.
However, since AMD didn't add FSR support (despite leaving the door open for it as the “#3 hardware vendor” in the open source app), many developers opted to simply use the DLSS API alone.
Given that DirectSR is an API directly from Microsoft's DirectX team, this particular bridge between supported games and a variety of upscalers seems to offer a more universal solution, which is good news for those of us who like to mess around with the graphics settings menu to find the best balance between performance and image quality for our respective devices.
After all, more choice is usually a good thing, and if DirectSR proves to be the missing link that Microsoft claims, the days may not be far away when universal upscaler support becomes the norm.
