The less said about gaming on the new wave of ARM-based Windows laptops, the better. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has severe driver issues resulting in generally poor performance and while the PRISM CPU translation layer allowing x86 code to run on ARM looks impressive, no support for AVX instructions means many games won’t even load. Let’s be generous and say that gaming support on ‘Windows on ARM’ hardware is a work-in-progress – but there’s an element I feel is well worth examining. Microsoft’s Auto Super Resolution upscaling technology has its limitations, but it works.
In robustly embracing the AI era, Microsoft has mandated that new, AI-focused Copilot+ PCs should contain an integrated neural processor rated for at least 40 TOPs (tensor operations). New processors like the Snapdragon X Elite and AMD’s Strix Point line contain the requisite hardware and while we can expect gaming not to touch the NPU for a good while yet, Microsoft’s Auto SR can be invoked at will on practically any game. Right now, there’s a curated ‘white list’ of games that support Auto SR, but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing stopping you from simply adding the feature yourself within the Windows control panel. Right now, Microsoft is only talking about Snapdragon support for Auto SR, but one would hope that the feature will roll out for all Copilot+ PCs in due course.
While both DLSS and Auto SR aim to take lower base resolution imagery and upscale them to higher resolutions, the way this is achieved is very, very different. DLSS and rivals like FSR2/3 and XeSS have a wealth of data to work from: the base image, motion vectors, colour and depth information and more. They’re also integrated into the game engine pipeline, meaning that some aspects of the image – such as post-processing or HUD elements – can be processed at native resolution. Auto SR seemingly only has access to the base image, effectively making it a screen-space upscaler.
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