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Earlier this week, Microsoft announced some new ROG Xbox Ally features including the introduction of 'Auto Super Resolution'; an AI upscaler in a similar vein to Nvidia's DLSS. This is the sort of AI tech players seem on board with, but that isn't the case for all uses of AI - something that Xbox boss Asha Sharma has again touched on via social media.
Following Xbox's official post about these new features, Sharma said that the team was "refocusing our AI efforts" moving forward - looking at things like "enhancing real-time graphics, improving discovery and deepening personalization". Sharma then pointed towards this Auto SR feature as an example of one of these core aims:
"We are refocusing our AI efforts to solving player problems like enhancing real-time graphics, improving discovery and deepening personalization. AutoSR shipping is a good early example: models reconstruct high-frequency detail from lower-res frames, increasing image quality and performance."
These sound like fairly palatable uses of AI in gaming to be fair, although Sharma and co. will have to tread that line carefully, at least in the eyes of core gamers. We saw what happened to Nvidia when it unveiled early concepts for DLSS5; Microsoft won't want to suffer a similar fate when revealing similar AI-led features.
But tame enough AI upscaling, better discovery options and a more personal Xbox experience all sound like decent uses of the tech to us, and we're curious to see how the team manages AI — and the messaging surrounding it — moving forward.