After NVIDIA launched its RTX VSR a few days ago, it’s Microsoft’s turn to announce its own VSR technology, currently available on its edge browser.
The Redmond firm indicates that three generations of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD cards are compatible with this technology.
VSR is coming to Edge, but not for everyone
VSR, or Video Super Resolution, is an AI-powered technology that significantly improves the quality of low-definition videos. Thanks to machine learning, it is able to improve videos in 720p or less, and therefore increase user comfort. Without sacrificing bandwidth, the AI removes compression artifacts and almost makes the video’s original definition forgettable.
This technology has therefore just arrived on the Canary build of the browser and can be activated manually by entering the command “edge://flags/#edge-video-super-resolution”. Unlike NVIDIA’s VSR, Microsoft’s Video Super Resolution is compatible with the last three generations of GeForce (RTX 20/30/40) and AMD (RX5700 to RX 7800) graphics cards. It should be noted that if the RX 7800 series from AMD is announced as being compatible, it is not yet on sale.
However, some constraints remain. The feature is currently only available to 50% of Canary build users, but that’s not the only restriction. Users must also have a device plugged into the mains, and videos protected by digital rights management tools such as Widevine or PlayReady cannot be enhanced. Microsoft is currently working on automatic hybrid GPU support for laptops with multiple GPUs. In the meantime, users can attempt to use VSR by changing the Windows settings to ” force Edge to run on [leur] Discrete GPU “.
And Chrome in all this?
Chrome now supports NVIDIA’s RTX VSR. Google’s browser has been compatible with the technology since early February, but the dedicated driver (Game Ready 531.18) only went live on February 28. Using GeForce Tensor cores, it improves the quality of videos played by streaming services such as YouTube, Twitch, Netflix and Hulu. Note that at present, you must have an RTX 30XX or 40XX card to take advantage of it.
At the same time, Intel announced its own VSR which will be compatible with all browsers using Chromium. We are therefore talking about support for Chrome, Brave, Iridium, Vivaldi, SRWare Iron, Yandex, Opera, Opera GX and… Microsoft Edge.
Source : Wccftech
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