When the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X was first announced, one of its biggest promised features was AutoSR, or automatic super resolution. And now, almost seven months after the handheld launched, the feature will be available to Windows insiders today.
AutoSR functions similarly to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR, in that it takes a lower resolution image and upscales it to a higher displayed resolution. Just like these other solutions, AutoSR would be using an AI model to upscale your games, but instead of using special cores in the GPU, it’s using the Xbox Ally X’s NPU, or neural processing unit.
Unlike other AI upscaling methods, AutoSR should work on pretty much any game. Because it isn’t implemented on a per-game basis like DLSS, AutoSR works at the driver level, so potentially any game running with DirectX should be compatible.
According to the DirectX blog about the technology, offloading the upscaling to the NPU allows for a larger model, which means greater preservation of detail, with a bit of a cost to latency. Microsoft also claims that its AutoSR model is more memory-efficient than other GPU-based upscalers, which are a bit more demanding on memory bandwidth. This is important, because handhelds like the Xbox Ally X don’t have a ton of memory bandwidth to spare.
However, rather than just kicking off for everyone using the Xbox Ally X, AutoSR will only initially be available to folks who connect their handhelds to an external display. That’s mostly because the higher resolution of a TV is hard for the Z2 Extreme to handle, so game-agnostic upscaling should go a long way to making games run a bit faster. Microsoft claims that this new technology can improve 1440p performance by about 30%, which could be the difference between a stuttering mess and a playable game.
Either way, I’ll be trying out this technology myself when the update goes live later today. And hopefully, Microsoft will allow this to be used in handheld mode soon – there are more than a few games that don’t exactly run super well at 1080p on the Xbox Ally X, after all.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
