With Microsoft’s entry into the world of AI upscaling, and its imminent rollout as a game-changing feature, PC gaming is due for an earthquake. This new technology is baked in and optimised for Windows 11, and catering directly to the first Copilot+ PCs, it offers a potential alternative to high frame rates without buying the latest discrete GPUs by Nvidia or AMD.
You can jump into your favourite game and play it in a new way on a system that doesn’t offer flagship graphics cards Microsoft’s AI upscaler, called Auto SR, is already making dreams come true. But in a limited way. Auto SR is bound by the hardware it’s been featured on: the ARM-based CPUs Qualcomm produces. When the technology is implemented broadly, it could revolutionise gaming. Scenes playing at 720p could end up looking like they were playing at 1440p, all while frame rates were high, thanks to deep learning.
Microsoft’s AI upscaling magic, meanwhile, doesn’t involve you meddling with the game itself: it creates the illusion, demonstrated in games such as Borderlands 3 and Baldur’s Gate III running on Copilot+ PCs at its recent Build conference, by working entirely invisibly and automatically. It’s just an AI model, fed game content and powered by Snapdragon’s new chips, that makes any game it encounters even faster and look better.
What’s different about Auto SR is that it won’t require specific implementation in games – unlike competitors such as DLSS or FSR – and instead promise to upscale any game to higher resolutions and frame rates for Copilot+ PCs. It’s all about gaming inside the Microsoft ecosystem, hosted in the cloud and on your computer, nothing outside of the proprietary Microsoft hardware box.
Of course, even a game at the highest grade will not play in the most demanding settings, but Microsoft’s AI upscaling still seems like a promising solution. Dozens of current titles from God of War to The Witcher III can be played at Auto SR to boost performance, and more can be added manually through the Windows 11 settings list.
But even as Microsoft adds AI upscaling to Windows 11 amid much fanfare, we must wait for further developments. Our entertainment machines may prove too slow to keep up, at least initially. And only select games are supported in the initial release of Auto SR. Games that were not ‘trained’ on the specific AI system cannot be upscaled. That’s why the initial release grants upscaling on just a few dozen games, with plans to expand the technology to AMD Ryzen AI 300 series CPUs and Intel’s Lunar Lake chips. What Microsoft is envisioning is a future where the power of AI upscaling is available to a larger set of systems than just those that run on Qualcomm ARM chips.
A global leading software development company, Microsoft is a pioneer in operating systems and services – including Windows, which runs on hundreds of millions of PCs worldwide; gaming and entertainment solutions – including the Xbox consoles – and applications for modern life – including office tools, productivity apps and services. Microsoft continues to be at the forefront of technology, creating new ways of gaming by blurring the line between PCs with powerful graphical capabilities and those with less powerful machines. By tapping into the former to power the latter, Microsoft is defining how games will be played and enjoyed by every gamer, everywhere and in the future.
And in conclusion, by allowing Xbox users to experience older games at higher frame rates with more elaborate textures, Microsoft’s work in AI upscaling to date with Auto SR can make the future of gaming more accessible, creating a generation of gamers who not only play games but experience them at near TV levels. And as this technology advances and spreads far beyond Copilot+ PCs, the next generation of gamers can expect just that.
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