Microsoft's auto AI upscaler will only be available on Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ AI PCs to begin with

Earlier this year, it came to light that Microsoft had been developing an AI upscaler for Windows, called Automatic Super Resolution (ASR). The concept behind the system is that any game can get a boost in performance and better anti-aliasing, even if it doesn't support DLSS, FSR, or XeSS. Microsoft has now made the feature available, except very few people will get to use it for now because it's only enabled on new Copilot+ AI PCs that sport Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processor.

The details of this limitation are found in the newly updated FAQ section of Microsoft's Copilot AI PC page (via Videocardz). The main reason why it's currently limiting its new technology to these specific Arm-based PCs is two-fold. 

Firstly, it provides an additional promotion for Microsoft's Copilot+ AI PC ecosystem, and secondly, the Snapdragon X range is the only one currently available that meets the 40 or higher TOPs NPU requirement.

NPUs, or neural processing units, are specialised accelerators for common calculations and data formats involved with AI operations. Think of them as being generalised versions of Nvidia's Tensor cores. AMD and Intel have them in some of their chips (e.g. Ryzen 7 8040U, Core Ultra 7 165H) but they don't have sufficient performance, measured in TOPS (tera operations per second), to meet the standard NPU rating set by Microsoft.

The concept behind ASR is a good one. While lots of modern games have built-in support for AMD, Intel, or Nvidia upscalers, most older ones don't and if you have a budget-level laptop, the integrated graphics processor might not be powerful enough to run such games at a decent frame rate. Microsoft's system gets around this problem by having an upscaler that can be applied to any game.

Well, that's the idea. Reality is somewhat different, as the number of games that ASR will actually work on is currently limited to just 12. I suspect that this is because these are the only games that run well enough on the Arm version of Windows and