Your ROG Xbox Ally X is about to get a free performance upgrade soon

The ROG Xbox Ally X is about to get sharper, faster graphics — courtesy of a free April update that uses AI to do the heavy lifting in games.

By Shikhar Mehrotra Published March 13, 2026

Armoury Crate SE on the Asus ROG Ally X. — Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

If you’ve ever squinted at your ROG Xbox Ally X’s screen and thought that it could be a little sharper, Xbox (and Microsoft) heard you, loud and clear. In April 2026, the handheld gaming PC will get a free software update that will make your games look better. No hardware updates or additional costs included.

Xbox will release a feature called Automatic Super Resolution or Auto SR — Microsoft’s AI-powered answer to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR — which upscales video games from 720p up to 1080p or more (via Windows Central).

What does the Auto SR feature do?

The feature forces your Ally X to work smarter, not harder, delivering a performance boost of up to 30%. Unlike DLSS and FSR, Auto SR works at the operating system level, implying that developers won’t need to integrate it on a per-game basis. However, the feature still trails Nvidia’s DLSS in outright image quality.

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No matter who the developer is or what the game is, Auto SR will simply work, well, mostly. For now, the feature supports DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games only. But why is it only available on the Xbox Ally X, and not the Xbox Ally?

So, why is it only coming to Ally X?

Well, the Ally X features AMD’s Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chipset, which, like the modern smartphones or CPUs, also includes a Neural Processing Unit, specifically designed for AI and machine learning workloads.

The feature seems to be relying on Ally X’s NPU to upscale the video games in real-time, without increasing the CPU’s load. Unfortunately, the base model doesn’t have one, which is why the feature is exclusive to the X variant.

One thing that worth pointing out — the April release is technically a preview, not a final, polished rollout. So while the 30% performance figure is exciting, real-world results may vary as Microsoft continues to refine it.

Shikhar Mehrotra

News Writer

For more than five years, Shikhar has consistently simplified developments in the field of consumer tech and presented them…

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