Microsoft has recently begun testing its Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR) function on the handheld device Xbox Ally X. This technology is regarded as a direct competitor to Nvidia's DLSS and is designed to improve the frame rate and picture quality of PC games. Auto SR first arrived on some Copilot Plus PCs nearly two years ago, and now Microsoft is bringing it to this 7-inch handheld console and opening it to Xbox Insider users for preview testing.
Microsoft said in a blog post introducing Auto SR that this test focused on docked play, which is a scenario where the Xbox Ally X is connected to a larger display device for gaming. Officials said that large screens and higher resolutions will make problems such as reduced image quality and unstable frame rates more obvious. This is the pain point that Auto SR is designed to solve. Therefore, the preview phase is focused on the base mode first, hoping that players will feel the greatest value in this scenario.
In terms of working principle, Auto SR is very similar to NVIDIA DLSS: it renders the game screen at a lower resolution to increase the frame rate, and then enlarges and reconstructs the screen through a super-resolution algorithm to improve performance while ensuring relative clarity. DLSS has gained "unexpectedly high" popularity among PC gamers in the past few years. More than 80% of RTX graphics card users will turn on the DLSS upscaling function. Microsoft also admitted that this has become a core component of the rendering process of many modern games, and players have clear expectations for similar technologies.
Unlike DLSS, AMD FSR or Intel XeSS, which require game manufacturers to integrate support in the game, Microsoft's Auto SR is a function built into the Windows system layer that can directly perform super-resolution processing on existing games. In Windows 11, Auto SR will be called through the Game Bar. Players can manually turn this feature on or off for DirectX 10 or later games, but Microsoft also reminds that the actual effects of different games may vary.
It is worth noting that the early implementation of Auto SR was limited to Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon notebook platform, and at that time it only took effect automatically for 12 whitelisted games. Today, this technology is brought to the Xbox Ally X handheld console based on the AMD platform and is open to more games using DirectX, indicating that Microsoft is accelerating the development of Auto SR into a system-level capability covering multiple hardware and cross-device.
Microsoft is currently demonstrating the effects of Auto SR in terms of frame rate improvements and texture detail enhancements with Forza Horizon 5, demonstrating its performance in real-world gaming scenarios. As the scope of testing gradually expands, whether Auto SR can become the "second choice" to compete with DLSS in the PC ecosystem, and how much actual experience improvement it can bring in the combination of handheld consoles and large TV screens, will become the focus of players and the industry in the future.