Microsoft’s upscaler goes handheld
Microsoft has started rolling out Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR), its AI upscaling tech that competes with Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR, to the ROG Xbox Ally X, ROG Xbox Ally X20 and select Copilot+ PCs. The official release removes the preview’s biggest limitation: you no longer have to dock the handheld to use it.
The preview capped the upscaler at around 60 to 75fps, and that limit still applies to the default Quality mode.
Both will arrive through Windows updates, so they “may take a little time to reach your device,” Bojanic noted. Microsoft began testing Auto SR on the Ally X in April, but only for docked play on a bigger screen. The final version works in handheld mode, even on battery. It also supports games running at the Ally’s native 1080p, so you don’t have to lower the in-game resolution first. The other big addition is a new Performance mode. Performance mode raises it to 120fps, which should help in fast shooters. Auto SR now also works with Auto HDR, which adds HDR to games that never shipped with it.
Last month, AMD brought FSR 4.1 to Ally handhelds with the Z2 Extreme chip, so Ally X and X20 owners already had one upscaling option. Games must use DirectX 10 or later and run on x64 or Arm64, which leaves out DirectX 9, Vulkan and OpenGL titles. Auto SR is built into Windows and is meant for games you already own. It renders a game at a lower resolution, then uses the neural processing unit (NPU) to scale the image up, all on the device. That’s why the base ROG Xbox Ally, which has no NPU, can’t use it. Nvidia’s DLSS doesn’t run natively on any of these handhelds. Auto SR has its own limits too. You turn it on per game from the Display widget in Xbox Game Bar (Win + G), and the game has to be in fullscreen.