Microsoft has shared more details about Auto SR, including a preliminary list of the first few games that will be playable using the technology.
Microsoft Auto SR is an upscaling technology, competing with DLSS, XeSS, and FSR. It’s different because it uses an AI to upscale resolutions and improve framerates, but here’s the part which should impress every game developer.
As reported by Tom Warren for The Verge, Auto SR will work without any any manual configuration from the player, and without game developers having to make changes to how their games render. So, you know how game developers have to choose if their game will be optimized between DLSS and RTX first? They won’t need to do that for Auto SR.
The reason it can do this is because all the AI work is being done by the NPU, or neural processing unit. Now, if you hadn’t heard this yet, the new generation of CoPilot + PCs will all have NPUs, dedicated to do AI tasks on its own, and bundled alongside CPUs and GPUs in one chipset.
Because the NPU will do all the upscaling, the GPU is freed up to improve on other aspects of game performance. So theoretically, you can have a CoPilot+ PC run ambient occlusion at a higher framerate and resolution, than is possible on an older PC that doesn’t have an NPU. And, it will be more efficient, opening up the window to use this on portable devices.
There is one catch, which is why the list of compatible games is limited for now. Auto SR will add an average of one frame of latency. Microsoft has to test each game to see if it affects performance, and adjust accordingly. Of course, in time, they should be able to fix this issue with more games so that most will be compatible.
So, here’s the list of Auto SR compatible games, verified by Microsoft:
- Borderlands 3
- Control (DX11)
- Dark Souls III
- God of War
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance
- Resident Evil 2
- Resident Evil 3
- Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
- Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2
- The Witcher 3
For now, it’s not a very big list, but Microsoft also makes a lot of big promises that could mean huge things for video games, not in the next three years, but later in 2024.
As we reported a few days ago, MSI is first to market with a CoPilot + enabled gaming handheld, with their MSI Claw 8 AI +. This device will come with Intel’s Lunar Lake chipsets, which promises to make x86 as power efficient as ARM. So, the MSI Claw 8 AI + won’t be running ARM, but x86 Windows with full compatibility with x86 games.
And in spite of this smaller list, we may see Microsoft and/or MSI come up with other uses for the NPU for gaming, before launch and after. While there’s a lot of warranted skepticism for CoPilot+, we should acknowledge that there’s a lot of potential to it too. We may already be looking at the future, not only of Windows PC, but of video games as a whole.
