Windows Automatic Super Resolution is not exclusive to the Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm confirms

Who thought that the Windows Automatic Super Resolution would remain exclusive for devices with Snapdragon X Elite he was wrong. The Qualcomm processor will immediately support Microsoft’s Auto SR upscaling technology, allowing the chipset’s GPU to deliver better frame rates in various games. Automatic Super Resolution may therefore be available for several notebooks equipped with Snapdragon X Elite, but it will not forever be exclusive to this chip.

Although we had already hypothesized it, the confirmation came directly from Qualcomm spokesperson Macey Davis: speaking with The Verge, Davis stated that Automatic Super Resolution is a feature developed by Microsoft, not by the chipset manufacturer. This means that it is technically not exclusive to the Snapdragon X Elite, although for now the upscaling technology can only be performed on this platform. In short, the Auto SR currently only works with Snapdragon X Elite, but in the future systems with Intel and AMD processors could become compatible.

“The term ‘exclusive’ really refers to what is available today,” Davis added, “so it will no longer be valid if another technology comes along that meets Microsoft’s performance threshold. Since Automatic Super Resolution integrates with Windows on a Copilot+ PC, currently Qualcomm is the only manufacturer capable of running it exclusively.”

Auto SR also on Intel and AMD NPUs

Any computer with the “Copilot + PC” brand will therefore be able to run Microsoft’s Automatic Super Resolution which, as mentioned, at this stage is only supported by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite thanks to its Hexagon NPU. Obviously we still don’t know which processors will be able to exploit this technology in the future but, as we anticipated in the article Super Automatic Resolution of Windows: enhanced gaming, but only on selected PCs, Intel and AMD will probably introduce next generation CPUs with faster NPUs, the which means these chips should be able to activate Auto SR at will.

Intel’s Lunar Lake processor line, for example, will feature a 40% faster NPU, with combined GPU performance resulting in 105 TOPS. NVIDIA is also reportedly preparing a new chipset with Cortex-X5 configuration, Blackwell RTX GPU and LPDDR6 memory in a single package. The GPU will likely support a new version of DLSS which will significantly increase FPS.