Souped-up graphics playing cards aren’t only for enjoying video video games, you understand. They may also play…movies. Sans video games. Or extra precisely, they’ll improve them, at the very least with highly effective software program like Nvidia’s RTX Video Super Resolution. This device makes use of an additional little bit of GPU oomph to upscale and clear low-res movies. But for those who favor one thing a bit of extra agnostic, Microsoft simply launched its personal model in Edge…and it performs good with the newer playing cards from each Nvidia and AMD.

Video Super Resolution is the newest characteristic baked into the experimental Canary release of Microsoft’s Edge browser. It can study internet video working at 720p decision or decrease and mechanically upscale it utilizing your GPU. The device will work on any streaming video that’s not copyright protected (so most of YouTube, however not streaming companies like Netflix or Disney+), sharpening and cleansing the look in real-time. It’s inferior to precise high-quality video, however in the appropriate circumstances it’s a dramatic enchancment.

For the preliminary launch, Video Super Resolution works on machines with Nvidia GeForce RTX 20-series playing cards or newer, or AMD Radeon RX 5700 playing cards or newer. Laptop customers will even must be plugged into AC energy, as a result of spinning up that graphics card along with the excessive CPU utilization of streaming video goes to undergo your battery like a bull charging by means of a Pamplona vacationer. Even so, Microsoft says it’s solely enabling the characteristic for 50 p.c of customers firstly, so it’s a coin flip on whether or not you’ll truly see it.

Typically new options within the Edge Canary construct take a few months to get to the discharge construct put in on a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of Windows machines. Video Super Resolution is perhaps an exception, as a result of it’s far more advanced than the same old engine tweak or consumer interface adjustment. It might take Microsoft a bit longer to iron out the kinks.

If you’ve an RTX 30- or 40-series GPU, you possibly can already check out Nvidia’s awesome RTX Video Super Resolution, which works on any internet video—together with copyright protected ones. In reality, RTX VSR works greatest with high-quality streams from the likes of Netflix and Disney+.