Microsoft Eying DirectML as DLSS alternative on Xbox

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Much like AMD is eying DirectML as a substitute for DLSS, Microsoft is doing the same thing. And yeah they're actively developing it as part of DirectX. However interesting to learn is that technology is going to make a move to the XBOX as well.



An while writing it I just realized, it's not odd at all, as the new XBOX is powered by RDNA2 AMD Radeon hardware. DLSS has proven to be slowly becoming a success. Especially DLSS v2.0 offers significant performance improvements. NVIDIA however is utilized dedicated hardware or DLSS through the Tensor cores, whereas AMD would need to run it over the compute engine. 

DirectML

It seems development is well underway. DirectML is built on top of Direct3D. Microsoft showed the following image as an example of DirectML-based “super-resolution” AI scaling technique with Forza Horizon 3. The comparison shows a frame from the game with DirectML super-resolution (left) and upscaled normal through the bilinear filter (right).


ML Super Sampling (left) and bilinear upsampling (right)


Microsoft apparently plans to bring something similar to Xbox Series X and Series S, which would be especially interesting. And yeah, AMD on their end are looking into using ML for the new Radeon series desktop graphics cards.  It will be interesting to see what the performance hit will be and if it outweighs the usage of that compute engine as NVIDIA RTX has hardware dedicated to machine deep learning, while the hardware implementation of RDNA2 does not.

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