Microsoft is launching DirectSR – and I couldn’t be more excited about how much of a difference it will make to PC gaming
Microsoft has announced that DirectSR has been released, albeit in preview, but this is an important first step for a technology that promises to have a major impact on PC gamers.
Why? Because DirectSR is a big piece of the upscaling puzzle – allowing games to run faster, by rendering them at a lower resolution and then upscaling to a higher resolution (with quality close to that of the native resolution).
Rather than an actual upscaling technology, DirectSR is an API that makes it easier for Windows game developers to integrate multiple existing upscaling solutions. This means that if a developer with DirectSR wants to bring Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR or Intel XeSS on board a game to speed up frame rates, they can do so with much less effort.
This obviously means that more PC games will benefit from these upscaling features – and I hope this will be the start of much wider use of games like DLSS across different titles.
That’s certainly the idea anyway, and Microsoft has now officially launched DirectSR in its new Agility SDK 1.714.0 developer preview release.
Microsoft tells us that this first incarnation will come with support for AMD’s FSR 2.2 and driver-level support for DLSS and XeSS.
Analysis: On-time arrival
This is really good news, because as you may have seen when I previously reported on DirectSR, I am very excited about the introduction of the technology for all the reasons mentioned above – but I was concerned that it might take quite a long time. not yet implemented.
I didn’t expect a DirectSR preview to go live so soon, and based on the rumors – which were admittedly shaky – I figured this was something for next year.
Well, that’s certainly not the case, and to see it in preview now is a very positive development in terms of the potential timeframe for the realization of this scale-up enabler.
Simply put, I’m even more excited about this now, and as mentioned, I expect this to have a broad impact on PC gaming and speed up frame rates. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that PC gaming could have merely witnessed the first step on a revolutionary path to smoother gaming, and that’s to be hoped.