Next year, more hardware will receive Microsoft Auto SR

The compatibility of Redmond’s general upscaler will also be improved.

Back in February, we wrote about Microsoft developing its own upscaling procedure, which is still available, but for now it works on Qualcomm Snapdragon X system chips, of course only with the appropriate 24H2 Windows 11 update.

Currently, the list of tested games is not very large, but this will change next year at the latest, as we have learned that the compatibility of the upscaler will improve significantly with the upcoming updates. In addition, it will be applicable on more hardware later, as the release designed for AMD and Intel designs is coming. In the case of each platform, the system runs on the NPU integrated into the processor, which Microsoft previously explained by saying that it is a completely AI-based solution, i.e. not an alternative similar to the existing scalers, which hardly or not at all extends to AI, so the real-time availability of appropriate hardware.

We also learned that technically Auto SR could be run via the DirectML interface on graphics controllers as well, but since the processors inside the GPUs, sharpened for matrix multiplication, use the same register area as the main ALUs, so with active Auto SR massively the number of concurrently running waves in each game is deteriorating. For this reason, in most cases, Auto SR does not speed up the processing, but actually slows it down, that is, it would offer a particularly bad experience. On the other hand, acceleration can be achieved when running on an NPU, which is considered a dedicated resource, and this would be the essence of the technique. If the architecture of GPUs changes later and they become much more suitable for AI tasks in addition to existing graphics sessions, maybe preemptive multitasking and QoS for the GPU at the operating system level will improve, then they can probably get Auto SR.