Microsoft’s DLSS competitor is now available on the Xbox Ally X handheld

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Follow Follow See All Tech Microsoft’s DLSS competitor is now available on the Xbox Ally X handheld Xbox Insiders can try out Auto SR, which improves frame rates and visual quality in PC games. Xbox Insiders can try out Auto SR, which improves frame rates and visual quality in PC games. by Tom Warren Close Tom Warren Senior Correspondent Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Technical Details

Follow Follow See All by Tom Warren Apr 30, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Tom Warren Close Tom Warren Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Tom Warren is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Microsoft is starting to test its Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR) feature with the Xbox Ally X.

Auto SR first debuted on some Copilot Plus PCs nearly two years ago, improving visual quality and frame rates in select games. Now, Microsoft is testing it for docked play on the Xbox Ally X, allowing the 7-inch handheld to improve resolution and graphical settings for bigger TV screens. “Docked play means larger screens and higher resolutions, where drops in image quality are more noticeable or where some games struggle to maintain smooth FPS,” says Microsoft in a detailed blog post on Auto SR.

“That’s exactly the problem Auto SR was designed to solve, so we’re starting the preview with docked mode where we expect players will see the most value. ” Auto SR works much like Nvidia’s DLSS, rendering a game at lower resolution to boost frame rates and then upscaling those frames to improve image quality. DLSS has become surprisingly popular in recent years, with more than 80 percent of RTX GPU owners activating DLSS upscaling.

Industry Implications

“It is often a core part of how many modern games render, and players expect it,” says Microsoft. Auto SR will be available from the Game Bar in Windows 11. Image: Microsoft Not every game ships with DLSS, AMD’s FSR, or Intel’s XeSS, but Microsoft’s Auto SR is built into Windows and can apply super resolution to existing games without game-integrated options.

It’s not clear how well this will work across a variety of different games. Originally Auto SR was something Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon laptops would do automatically for 12 whitelisted games, and now it’s on an AMD handheld and Microsoft says you can toggle it on for DirectX 10 or later games with varying results.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.