If you are a PC gamer, you must already be familiar with NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR technologies. These technologies are usually launched for the products of the two major display giants, and even mainly for newer products. The support is relatively limited, but there are currently no other comparable solutions that can replace the solutions of the two giants. This situation may change with Microsoft’s entry into the war, because recent news has pointed out that Microsoft is recruiting people to use artificial intelligence to improve game resolution and image quality performance. This technology is expected to be used on Microsoft’s own operating systems and Xbox game consoles:
▲Microsoft not only intends to become one of the gaming giants, but also wants to use its own advantages to provide better game quality (Image source）
How to improve the game experience with limited hardware resources is a popular keyword searched by many players online. After the two major display giants announced the provision of their own ray tracing technology, players began to discuss the pursuit of future-like light and shadow image quality in new games that support this technology. Although ray tracing has brought amazing improvements to game graphics, it also has a huge impact on performance. How to strike a balance between special effects and smoothness is a problem, and NVIDIA and AMD have successively come up with DLSS and FSR, two technologies that have the same goal but have different approaches to solve such problems.
NVIDIA DLSS (or “Deep Learning Ultra High Sampling”), as the name suggests, uses artificial intelligence computing capabilities to increase lower-resolution game graphics to high-resolution levels. Not only has the picture quality improved dramatically, it can also further reduce the impact on hardware resources. Although AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) has a different name and does not emphasize the involvement of artificial intelligence, the principle is basically the same as what DLSS does. These technologies hope that even if players increase the game resolution, they can still play smoothly without adding too much system burden. And Microsoft obviously plans to get involved in this world:
▲Although NVIDIA DLSS is not designed for light tracing, the biggest benefit is from its own light tracing technology (Image source）
▲Demonstration of the effect of AMD FSR technology in the game “GODFALL” (Image source）
Microsoft was recently spotted with job descriptions for two new positions, suggesting that the company is likely planning to develop a new feature similar to NVIDIA’s DLSS technology. These two positions are Principal Software Engineer for Graphics and Senior Software Engineer. Although the description is very vague, if you look closely, you can notice that Microsoft really wants to do something about the game’s graphics recently. The areas that are very close to these descriptions should be technologies like DLSS or AMD FSR:
▲Microsoft clearly states on its job page for Principal Software Engineer for Graphics that “We are looking to help provide the most advanced GPU capabilities to AAA game developers on Xbox and Windows” (Pictures taken from the Internet）
▲Senior Software Engineer’s explanation is more obscure, but he mentioned that Xbox may use machine learning to improve the efficiency of traditional rendering algorithms (Pictures taken from the Internet）
However, after all, Microsoft is not a major graphics card developer. In theory, this technology will have a greater chance of being used on its own game console Xbox. In addition, Microsoft’s strategy in recent years is to enable games to be directly supported on Xbox and Windows PC, so it can be speculated that this DLSS-like technology may also be used on personal computers. Since Microsoft owns the world’s largest graphics API (i.e. DirectX), this technology has a high probability of being directly applied on top of it. For example, Microsoft’s own DirectML database can be used to help optimize GPU resources after AI machine learning:
▲Xbox has always been the game market that Microsoft attaches great importance to (Image source）
However, Microsoft is actually also using AMD FSR for game development on Xbox. This is due to the different characteristics of this technology and NVIDIA DLSS, that is, one side uses an open source approach to provide licensing, and the other side chooses to bind dedicated hardware for licensing. Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that Microsoft intends to develop its own version of “DLSS” technology based on AMD FSR, or to use Microsoft’s resources to further strengthen AMD FSR technology.
No matter what, if Microsoft really intends to help everyone spend less money to play higher-resolution games on existing hardware, I believe everyone will agree with me with both hands and feet.
Source: KOCPC Chinese