Microsoft Auto SR Tested: An AI Upscaler That Works On Every Game? 

The less NVIDIA exclusivity we have the better everything is

I think this is why the surface team now leading xbox hardware team

Calling it now. Xbox handheld with dedicated NPU and this tech... I'm combination with an overhaul of how windows supports gaming in general

As a Tomb Raider snob that hates when Americans call Lara, Laura...at 10:22 he kinda says Lara, but then goes 'sorry Laira...And now I don't know what is life

I can see this tech being used by gamers with handheld or otherwise lower powered PC's (Steam deck, ROG Ally, etc) connected to higher res monitors to great effect.

I love John's take, integer scaling is so underrated and 720p can actually look great. I noticed the effect accidentally years ago and once I properly learned about it, it became my go-to for non-DLSS games.

Very curious as to what something like 1440p Balanced/Quality -> 4K AutoSR would be like (As 1440p Balanced/Quality are 820p and 900p respectively, so higher than 4K Ultra Performance but a lower IR than 4K Performance). The Upscaling cost of 1440p vs 4K is what makes me curious here as DLSS has a notable increase in computational cost to output 4K versus 1440p. So if AutoSR's flaws can be masked by the sheer increase in pixels in the initial image (and the shorter throw to 4K versus 720p -> 4K), how close would a 1440p Quality +AutoSR 4K image be to a 4K Performance Mode image using DLSS?

Very cool! Excited to check this out! How was the input latency hit? You mention it but do not really characterize/measure it…

If you had to choose, would it be better if this becomes the new standard, or FSR? Which one would be the better upscaler if only 1 could win

never heard Lara pronnounced Laira before 😂

Hoping that this tech drops on Xbox Series, could be interesting to games that have not enhanced options on Backward compatibility games, or even in actual games

Damn ... That + lossless scaling frame generation is gonna be lit ❤❤❤❤❤❤

Can this work on Xbox? There are some of the best games which still run on 900p in Series S/X consoles.

Oooo that handheld gonna be fire 🔥!

Very few things in the world gets more use than that picture of Richard in DF's thumbnails.

this is probably the only real use of an NPU that windows has, everything else is a gimmick so im glad to see at least this works. Could we get a video on how elden ring refuses to support ultrawide monitors (theyre supported but then disabled via black bars pasted over a rendered image) and if you mod the game to remove the black bars they artificially add to the sides to force 16x9 they will ban you from online play? I feel like thats a more interesting and important story than talking about bad traversal stutter in fromsoft games for the thousandth time.

DLSS has telltale shortcomings that everyone has known about for years, particularly having to do with two zones of vastly differing temporal vectors and the artifacts that can engender. None of the clips showcase such a circumstance and I can't help but feel tempted to suspect that this is by design.

Fully agree with John's comments about nearest-neighbour / integer upscaling. 99/100 times I would take half-resolution integer scaling over a blurry / smeary upscaling postprocess.

Unless I misunderstood parts of this discussion I see no information on Auto SR on X86 platforms (they have openly stated support only for windows on ARM Co Pilot PC’s). Am I mistaken?

No HDR and limited to DX11 and DX12 and limited to snapdragon elite at the moment. Curious why it’s limited to Copilot+ only

So, this is such a weird way to do things, but the best utility I ever got out of RSR (and where I would recommend trying Auto SR) was playing games on a 1080p monitor that were specifically built for 720p. Like, for example, Xenblade X in CEMU. It has trouble when you don't play at an integer multiple of 720p - so I would render at 1440p, downscale to 720p to get some janky SSAA, then RSR up to 1080p and it looked pretty darned good. The biggest benefit is that the sharpening helps with the lower-res textures that were developed specifically for 720p output. It's definitely better than just running at 1080p.

Could you test with metal gear solid 3 from steam using auto SR? I'm curious if this does the job that Konami didn't do in the master collection.

I agree that raw 720p looks better than most of the upscale. My tv upscales ps3 very well, same with most 360 games

Something I'm wondering, is: will AutoSR be available for other types of Neural Processing Units? Can the software be run on other NPU's, such as those on Intel and AMD APU's? Both AMD and Intel have fairly big upgrades to their NPU's in their latest chips. (AMD Ryzen AI for their Laptops of course -- and I *do* see Microsoft as one of their partners for these new NPU's, so I imagine it must be in the works)

Npu will be used as upscalers for all games with any graphics card... Might work

In 5-10 years from now they're all going to damn near perfect.

If Auto SR indeed runs on the NPU, then that’s a great proof of concept already. People are not willing to spend extra $$$ for SoC with NPU for generative AI future proofing alone. But many laptop gamers would be willing to do that if NPU provides DLSS3 quality upscaling for zero GPU cost. Next step: provide NPU with motion vectors. NPU reads+writes internal full res accumulation/history buffer. But there’s no free lunch. NPU upscaler would also need couple of full screen passes to do the upscaling, just like a GPU algorithm would. In a shared memory system this is competing with GPU bandwidth. Also NPU would use some of the shared TDP. NPU is of course more optimal for tensor work than GPU, so it would be more efficient. And AMD and Qualcomm do not have deficated tensor matrix units in their consumer GPUs (AMDs WMMA intrinsics just utilize existing vector ALUs better). NPU upscaling seems like a great idea for these vendors. Nvidia has tensor cores in consumer GPUs too, and if I understood correctly Intel is bringing tensor cores to their consumer GPU too, in addition to the NPU (Lunar Lake).

I could see there being some issues doing this with a dedicated GPU--if only because the NPU and GPU aren't going to be on the same SoC then, and transmitting the data across the PCIe connection might add more latency? But we'll have to see. Might give GPUs a reason to finally implement PCIe 5 😅

7:45 It definitely uses more frames. There are ghosting artifacts in some scenes. That can only happen if you use more frames.

Use lossless scaling, great program.

Can xbox use this auto SR to improve the backward compatibility? Sorry about my bad english :)

*expletive YEAH!

I am going to call this guy Mr egg going forward. Subscribed...

Isn't MS upscaling techs based on AMD's FSR 2.x? And AMD already offers the option to enable FSR 2.x in all games through their driver. So MS's upscaling tech looks more and more like FSR 2.x with extra code to use the NPU for better results. We might be looking at a future FSR version where an NPU is used for better image quality.

The real question is, if all the transistors that went into the NPU had gone into the GPU instead, would you have gotten the same results? I can't help thinking that NPUs are a solution looking for a problem. OpenCL exists precisely to abstract this stuff away.

What happened to condemned 2 bloodshot, and quake 4. Is Microsoft not updating them for a reason? If older games work, what could be wrong with those two games?

Microsoft only need to implement their own version of Frame Generation at OS level, and this would be perfect.

Lossless Scaling LS1 is much better.

this guy is the professor of PC gaming

Will normal Windows users get AutoSR as an update? Or is Microsoft going to hoard the tech for select users only??

Should come in handy for the Xbox Handheld…

Hi Everyone !

I only want to upscale N64 and Ps2 to 4k.

Mah...fare una versione con batteria decente e ricarica "fast" da almeno 100kw...l'avrei fatta

Latency destroys gameplay

AI upscaling ruined Aliens and The Abyss

So now..we have hardware base upscaling by Nvidia, software based upscaling by AMD, and now upcoming A.I based upscaling by Microsoft.. interesting..

Lossless scaling is available and it wasn't compared or mentioned once 🤦

So I need a compatible cpu in order to run this? Meh.

its possible to use now? if not, when its gonna launch for everyone?

Don’t Microsoft already have an in-house upscaler, the one they put in their Xbox consoles.

You know what is even MORE impressive? Good performance at native res... you know, the settings that don't introduce more image stability problems.

Haha been saying you people been getting scammed for years now!!!

makes my deck hard

Shame it needs one of those snapdragon processors and microsoft potentially recording everything that you do to get this lol

All I care is when it comes to this new tech is frame times and input delay, all these new stuff makes the games play worse to look better, that is insane to me.

First !!

Why don't you zoom in 1000% like you do for PS games

They should backport this to their old xbox consoles

To me this looks like FSR 1.0

Why is the title a question? Why are you asking me? How would I know? Shouldn’t the title of a video tell me something?

Why do you always go to control by default when comparing graphics? Not only control, but specifically the dull office interiors with cream colored floors and ceilings and really only green grey white and almost black colors. I can think of ten prettier looking games than control to measure visual features with like Jedi survivor or Avatar or robo cop or Doom 16 or eternal or tears of the kingdom even idk pick anything newer than 2016 and control's interior office space. Something with a view like a blue sky and water and green trees and houses. In not biased against control but I have tried to play it and like the newer prey game, I was forced to stop playing because every time I tried, about 30 minutes in, those 2 games give me a migraine and I don't know why. I would've enjoyed them greatly but I can't even look at them. Anyways, I'm not against the game but for graphical comparisons or developer features it's a pretty bland looking game compared to most games from 2018 to today. Is it something to do with the engine? Is it running on unreal? And with it's age, wouldn't that be 4?

Here before the angry ponies 🤣🤣

Weird it came first to PC than xbox. Gamepass is also cheaper on PC than xbox now. Is Microsoft hinting at something?

Input lag? No thanks.

Microsoft needs to focus on the OS and ONLY the OS. Let other companies focus on special areas like cpu, and gpu, as long as Windows can properly allow open channels for communication between the devices and networks. Windows is just bad when it comes to balancing all the things. I am ALWAYS having issues with HDR, or getting Dolby Atmos to stay as I set it. I do not appreciate having to keep setting my preferences over and over and over again within the OS. This is where Microsoft keeps dropping the ball. The audio and graphics should be offloaded to the hardware devices and their corresponding software. Maintaining this balance across all platforms and builds is the real struggle. The hardware device apis and the os need crystal clear communication. High quality graphics scalers I believe should be built into gpu control panels rather than injected with post processing into games. Things are as they are because the way forward flows like a river into the ocean, showing the way. Thank God for Lossless Scaling, and just imagine a small and affordable Mclassic type of device with that kind of power... or a soc on our gpus with the same high quality features... I have been waiting YEARS for nvidia to get some form of anti lag frame insertion and proper hq upscaing to make old blurry games come back to life. Still hopeful, but no longer holding my breath about it. All of these companies compete for money, not to make consumers happy. If a bunch of smart people with influence got together to have a study about what people want in a pc across the board, we could have an incredible future with new hardware, new feature sets, and new ways of getting stuff done with style. We could have a technological epoch if we could stop allowing advertisements and commercials to interfere with our thinking and destroy our ideas and creativity.

Can't believe they're still working from home. No wonder they got so lazy

Gaming stopped being cool a long, long time ago. Now it is about selling you graphics