Microsoft seems to have botched the rollout of a nifty AI feature for Windows 11's Photos app

Microsoft's new super resolution ability - which was recently applied (in preview) to the Photos app in Windows 11 - has suffered from a seemingly botched rollout by the software giant.

This is a new AI ability - one for Copilot+ PCs, as it requires a beefy NPU for acceleration - and it allows for enhancing or enlarging images, by a factor of up to 8x. The idea is you can blow up a photo for a large print, or improve very low quality photos to something a bit sharper and more palatable.

This was supposed to be in testing for Windows Insiders, but as leaker PhantomOfEarth reports, super resolution was appearing on some devices that it wasn't supposed to be on. Presumably, that means non-Copilot+ PCs, rather than the feature coming to users outside of the Windows Insider programme.

At any rate, last week, Microsoft issued an update to say: "We investigated and fixed an issue where super resolution was appearing on PCs it shouldn't be. The fix is rolling out now."

However, according to PhantomOfEarth, this fix seems to have banished the super resolution feature from Photos on devices where it is supposed to be Copilot+ PCs, and a number of folks with supported PCs no longer have the ability.

Whatever Microsoft has changed with the deployment of super resolution appears to have overcompensated, by the sounds of things. Hopefully this will be a problem that can be resolved soon enough, but this feature has certainly got off on the wrong foot.

Read more: Google Chrome could detect websites that are bogging down performance - and deal with them