A few weeks ago, users found out that Microsoft is preparing resolution upgrades for Windows 11. Although you can already enable some features in the recent preview builds of Windows 11, the official announcement is nowhere to be found.
Microsoft is apparently planning to show off the Windows 11 resolution upgrades next month at the GDC conference in San Francisco.
The official program on the GDC website mentions “DirectSR”, or super resolution for Windows 11 apps and games, and we'll probably see some demo during the session "DirectX Start of the Union” scheduled for March 21, 2024. Here is the description (via The Verge):
The DirectX team will present the latest updates, demos and best practices for game development with key partners from AMD and NVIDIA. Worksheets are the newest way to take full advantage of GPU hardware and parallelize workloads. Microsoft will provide a preview of DirectSR, making it easier than ever for game developers to scale super resolution support across all Windows devices.”
The DirectX team will showcase the latest updates, demos, and best practices for game development with key partners from AMD and NVIDIA. Work graphs are the newest way to take full advantage of GPU hardware and parallelize workloads. Microsoft will provide a preview into DirectSR, making it easier than ever for game devs to scale super resolution support across Windows devices. Finally, dive into the latest tooling updates for PIX.
Gamers can already take advantage of different resolution upgrade programs made by Nvidia, AMD and Intel. Some of them (Nvidia) require very new hardware, while options from AMD and Intel work with older hardware as well. It remains to be seen what approach Microsoft will take.
Microsoft plans to release a major update of new features for Windows 11 in the second half of this year. It will bring many AI features, one of which could be DirectSR. While we have no official confirmation on the hardware requirements, reports say that some features will require dedicated hardware with neural processing units. You can already find system files that imply this, such as the NPUDetect.dll library in the Microsoft Paint files.
