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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 major ramifications for PC gamers.
Why? Because DirectSR is a big piece of the upscaling puzzle – whereby games can be made to run faster, by having them rendered at a lower resolution, then upscaled to a higher one (with a quality close to that of the native resolution).
Rather than an actual upscaling tech, DirectSR is an API which lets Windows game developers more easily incorporate multiple existing upscaling solutions. Meaning that with DirectSR, if any given developer wants to bring Nvidia DLSS, or AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS on board a game to speed up frame rates, they can do so with much less effort.
Of course, this will mean that more PC games get the benefit of these upscaling features – and I’m hoping it’ll be the start of the likes of DLSS being used much more widely across various titles.
That’s certainly the idea, anyway, and Microsoft has now officially unleashed DirectSR in its new Agility SDK 1.714.0 preview release for developers.
Microsoft tells us that this initial incarnation ships with support for AMD’s FSR 2.2, and driver level support for DLSS and XeSS.
Analysis: Timely arrival
This is really good news, because as you may have seen when I’ve reported on DirectSR before, I’m highly enthusiastic about seeing the tech introduced for all the reasons mentioned above – but I had concerns that it was perhaps still quite a long way off being implemented.
I didn’t expect to see a preview of DirectSR going live so soon, and indeed from the rumors – which were admittedly shaky – I figured this was something pencilled in for next year.
Well, that’s definitely 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 upscaling facilitator.
To put it simply: I’m even more excited about this now, and as mentioned, I anticipate it having a broad impact on PC games and speeding up frame rates. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that PC gaming could just have witnessed the first step on a revolutionary path forward to smoother gaming, and here’s hoping.