Microsoft has introduced an interesting new experimental feature for its Edge browser called Video Super Resolution (VSR). You can guess from its name that VSR is a tool to enhance the quality of low-resolution videos, which uses a combination of AI and dedicated graphics cards.
Because VSR is still an experimental feature, there are some limitations to how it can be used and by how many people. Firstly, it is being made available to only 50% of Edge Canary channel users who will see an HD icon in the address bar to enable or disable it.
Moreover, the feature can only be used if you have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX Series or an AMD Radeon RX5700-RX7800 series GPU. Microsoft said that it is working on enabling VSR to automatically support hybrid GPUs for laptops with multiple graphics cards in the future but in the meantime, those users can force Edge to run on their GPU by changing the Windows setting.
Not all videos can be upscaled by VSR as the company only enabled the feature for videos that are running at less than 720p. However, it must also have a height and width of more than 192 pixels. The video can’t be upscaled if it is protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies like PlayReady or Widevine, so you can rule out streaming services such as Netflix.
For the moment, VSR on Microsoft Edge can only work on computers connected to AC power, which means that it is not compatible with battery-powered devices. To manually enable the feature on the browser, users can go to edge://flags/#edge-video-super-resolution.
Since it’s still in the Canary stage, there’s no telling how long it will be for Video Super Resolution to be launched for all of the browser’s users on the stable version. More recently, Microsoft announced that it will be replacing the legacy engine for Edge’s PDF reader with Adobe Acrobat, free of charge to all its users starting in March.
(Source: Microsoft)
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