Microsoft is using Nvidia and AMD GPUs to upscale web videos in Edge

If it hurts your eyes to watch old, lower-resolution videos on the web, Microsoft is looking to fix that.

In a blog post, the company announced a new feature called video super resolution for Edge, its web browser. The feature, which is being tested with Edge Canary, “uses machine learning to enhance the quality of video viewed in Microsoft Edge by using graphics card agnostic algorithms to remove blocky compression artifacts and upscale the video resolution, so you can enjoy crisp and clear videos on YouTube and other video streaming platforms without sacrificing bandwidth.”

All of that video upscaling comes at a cost, however. The company says that VSR only works if you have a select graphics card, the video is played at less than 720p, and the computer is plugged in. All of the requirements are below:

• The device has one of the following graphics cards (GPUs): Nvidia RTX 20/30/40 series OR AMD RX5700-RX7800 series GPUs. ^[1]
• The video is played at less than 720p resolution.
• The device is not on battery power.
• Both the height and width of the video are greater than 192 pixels.
• The video is not protected with Digital Rights Management technologies like PlayReady or Widevine. Frames from these protected videos are not accessible to the browser for processing.

If you have one of these graphics cards and meet all of the rest of these criteria, you still might not be able to test this out just yet. The company says that it has currently only rolled out the feature to “a small set of customers in the Canary channel” but that it plans to make it available to more customers “over the coming weeks.” It says that it also plans to expand the number of graphics cards that the feature will work with.

The announcement comes on the same day that the company rolled out a new preview build for Windows 11 that adds support for live caption in more languages and file recommendations in File Explorer.