Microsoft unleashes DirectSR – and I couldn’t be more excited about how much difference this will make to PC games

Bringing the likes of DLSS to more PC games – and it’s happening more quickly than I expected

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Microsofthas 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 bringNvidia DLSS, orAMDFSR, orIntelXeSS on board a game to speed up frame rates, they can do so with much less effort.

Of course, this will mean that morePC gamesget 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 usthat 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.

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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.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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