Microsoft Edge uses Nvidia and AMD GPUs to upscale online videos

If watching outdated, lower-resolution movies on the web hurts your eyes, Microsoft is working to solve that.

In a blog post, the business introduced a new video super resolution function for Edge, its online 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 artefacts and upscale the video resolution, so you can enjoy crisp and clear videos on YouTube and other video streaming platforms without sacrificing bandwidth.”

Yet, all of that video upscaling comes at a cost. According to the firm, VSR only works if you have a certain graphics card, the video is less than 720p, and the computer is hooked in.

Even if you have one of these graphics cards and satisfy all of the other requirements, you may not be able to try this out just yet. According to the business, the functionality is now only accessible to “a limited number of consumers in the Canary channel,” but it aims to make it available to additional customers “in the coming weeks.” It also wants to enhance the number of graphics cards compatible with the capability.

The news comes on the same day that Microsoft released a new preview edition of Windows 11 that includes support for live captioning in additional languages and file suggestions in File Explorer.