Owners of high-end Asus ROG Ally handhelds, rejoice: Microsoft is officially launching its competitor to Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, and Intel’s XeSS.
Last month, AMD launched FSR 4.1 for ROG Ally devices with Z2 Extreme processors, covering the ROG Xbox Ally X and the ultra-expensive ROG Xbox Ally X20 lines. According to The Verge, Microsoft’s Automatic Super Resolution (ASR) is now out of preview and ready to install on Xbox Ally X and X20, as well as some AMD Ryzen Copilot+ PCs.
The feature requires a neural processing unit (NPU) that isn’t found on the base-model ROG Xbox Ally device. For many users, this might be the first time that an NPU has been relevant for anything at all. Besides ASR, the only major feature Asus has touted the NPU as enabling is highlight reels. Not exactly inspiring.
The headline addition, according to an announcement post from Microsoft product manager Stefan Bojanic, is a new “Performance Mode” that allows ASR to work at up to 120 frames per second, up from around 60 to 75. The company has also removed the requirement to dock Ally devices to use ASR. It works in handheld mode, including on battery, and supports the Ally line’s full 1080p resolution.
Bojanic warned that when games run at 1080p in handheld mode, “performance may not be as optimal as other configurations.” He added ASR should still present visual improvements, “especially in older games.”
ASR is also now compatible with Windows’ Auto HDR feature, which enhances the colors of games that don’t support HDR.
Performance Mode and Auto HDR compatibility “will be rolling out with Windows updates so they may take a little time to reach your device,” Bojanic noted.
This latest update provides a little more incentive to upgrade for owners of the original Ally lines, which used Z1 chips that AMD still actively supports. The Xbox Ally X line introduced numerous improvements, but at least according to benchmarks taken by Windows Central in October of last year, it only introduced a 10% to 15% improvement in performance over the Z1 Extreme model (which remains perfectly capable of playing all but the most demanding games).
Nvidia’s DLSS is not natively supported on ROG Ally devices, though unofficial workarounds exist.
