Microsoft brings Video Super Resolution to Edge browser

15 Mar 2023 · 2 min read · 47,995 views

Microsoft has started testing built-in video upscaling for AMD and Nvidia graphics cards on its Edge browser. Video Super Resolution (VSR) can increase quality and remove artefacts on web videos lower than 720p resolution by using artificial intelligence (AI). Nvidia’s latest graphics driver enables VSR support on its RTX cards, allowing them to upscale videos in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge up to 4K resolution. But the Edge implementation will also work on AMD Radeon graphics cards from the RX 5700 and up. Unfortunately, Intel Arc cards are not supported — at least for now. Microsoft’s upscaling tech uses GPU-agnostic algorithms to upgrade video quality. It required that Microsoft add a DirectX 12 presentation pipeline to the Chromium engine that Edge is built on, as it currently uses DirectX 11 for video decode/rasterisation. In its current guise, several conditions must be met for VSR to work on Edge, including:

The device must not be on battery power.
The height and width of the video must be greater than 192 pixels.
The video cannot be protected with Digital Rights Management technologies like PlayReady or Widevine. Frames from these protected videos are not accessible to the browser for processing. This would apply to streaming services like Netflix.
Systems with two GPUs must force Edge to run on the discrete GPU.

The VSR feature is currently only available to a handful of Edge Canary users. Users whose Edge Canary supports VSR will find a “Video Super Resolution” component under the edge://components Settings page. When enabled, an icon labelled “HD” next to the address bar will be highlighted. Users can press this button to switch off VSR if they find it too performance-intensive. For those interested in a technical deep-dive, Microsoft provided a detailed explanation of how VSR in Edge works in a recent blog post. The images below were among several Microsoft provided to illustrate the quality improvements achieved using VSR on YouTube videos. The original screen capture shown below was from a 360p video.