Hands on: Windows’ DLSS rival isn’t ready to save handheld gaming

Last week Microsoft announced the arrival of Auto SR, its Windows-branded alternative to upscaling tech like DLSS, with great fanfare. After being semi-exclusive to Snapdragon laptops, it came to the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X and… nothing else. Not even the non-X variant, since it needs an NPU to run. And also it only works in docked mode, not handheld mode. Far from a great start.

PCWorld video chief Adam Patrick Murray just happens to have an Xbox Ally X (the black one, again, the only one that this works on) over in our labs. He was kind enough to run a few tests. And suffice it to say, between the poor visuals, added headaches, and strange limitations — only working on one ROG Xbox Ally X model, only in docked mode, and only at a 720p resolution for upscaling — this isn’t the panacea for PC handhelds that Microsoft would like you to think it is.

Since Microsoft held up Borderlands 3 as an ideal test bed for Auto SR, that’s where Adam started. At the medium preset, which is pretty okay for the Xbox Ally X’s integrated graphics running at the 35-watt “turbo mode,” AutoSR managed to boost the framerate up to 62. That’s better than 57 frames per second at the recommended 1080p….but only by about ten percent. And you lose a few frames versus running unenhanced at the same 720p base resolution.

Borderlands 3, DX12, fullscreen, medium preset

But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. According to Adam, getting this to work requires more than plugging in a dock and flipping a switch in settings. In his words it looks much worse than native — no wonder those Microsoft screenshots were so cropped. He says it’s much more expensive in terms of performance and looks worse than native, with other headaches to boot. “Clunky as [bleep] and I had to restart the game sometimes to get it to take hold.”

While it’s only officially supported on a handful of games, Windows 11’s Auto SR tech should work with anything running DirectX 10 or later. So he also tried a couple of benchmark staples, which give us the opportunity to try out other upscaling tech too.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider, DX12, fullscreen, highest preset, no RT, no AA

In Tomb Raider Microsoft’s Auto SR outperformed Intel’s XeSS (which can also be used on AMD and Nvidia GPUs), and hit somewhere between non-enhanced 720p and 1080p performance. But again, the muddy graphics drag down the experience. “For my money, 720p native looked way better than Auto SR, which was super swimmy,” Adam says.

Cyberpunk 2077, fullscreen, Steam Deck preset

Cyberpunk is probably the most relevant test here, since it’s a more recent-ish game with tons of visual flair, and lets us test Microsoft, AMD, and Intel upscaling tech. It’s also a game you’d want to play on a handheld, despite the compromises necessary. Again, Auto SR falls in between 720p native and 1080p native in terms of performance, but it’s running neck and neck with AMD’s FSR tech. And again, at least to Adam’s eyes on a docked display, the native graphics look much cleaner even if they’re running at lower effective resolutions.

Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry

Windows 11’s Auto SR brings along some headaches, too. Disconnecting from the dock made Steam scale incorrectly, requiring a reboot…which caused Windows to scale incorrectly. Between the incredibly specific conditions required to actually use it, the poor visual quality of the tech itself, and the headache of switching back to handheld mode, it seems like it just isn’t worth the bother at the moment.

To be fair, this is very clearly labelled as a “Preview” by both Microsoft and Windows itself. But it’s clear that Auto SR has a long way to go to compete with upscaling techniques that have been around for a while.