By Thanks to AI and other enhancements
- by Ben Kerry
Sick of all the ROG Xbox Ally news today, folks? Never! We’ve been waiting a long time to see what this device — or pair of devices, should we say — is capable of, and some fresh details on the beefier X model tell us that it’ll actually get better over time.
As part of today’s lengthy Xbox Wire blog about the launch of ROG Xbox Ally this October, one section of the post goes into detail on how “Enhanced Play” for the Ally X is “coming soon”. That enhancement arrives in the form of hardware-level AI upscaling – or as Microsoft is calling it, “a powerful neural processing unit”:
“The Xbox Ally X is the first handheld to leverage the top-of-stack AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme, paired with a powerful neural processing unit (NPU) to unlock upcoming AI powered features starting early next year—with more to come:
Automatic Super Resolution (Auto SR): A system-level feature that uses the power of the NPU to upscale games running at lower resolutions—delivering high-resolution visuals and smooth framerates across a wide range of games, with no additional changes required from game developers.”
This is a very similar feature to something like PSSR that’s now in use on PS5 Pro, or equivalent AI upscalers from the likes of Nvidia and AMD. It essentially uses AI to reconstruct game images from lower resolutions, resulting in better performance in a more effective way than existing software solutions that are already present in some Xbox games.
Owners of the base ROG Xbox Ally may well miss out on this level of tech, but there are still plenty of post-launch enhancements coming to both systems as well. Advanced shader delivery, enhancements to the docking experience and more will arrive after launch for ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X.
What do you make of these post-launch enhancements? Talk to us about your new handheld allies down below.
[source news.xbox.com]
Ben is a News Writer at Pure Xbox, and is a fan of action, racing and straight-up shootin’ in any Xbox game he can get his hands on. When he’s not clutching an Xbox controller like his life depends on it, Ben spends his time listening to music that’s far too old for him, watching football on the telly and probably eating somewhere.