Arm’s new upscaler promises PC-quality graphics on mobile

2 months ago 30

Ryan Daws is a senior editor at TechForge Media with over a decade of experience in crafting compelling narratives and making complex topics accessible. His articles and interviews with industry leaders have earned him recognition as a key influencer by organisations like Onalytica. Under his leadership, publications have been praised by analyst firms such as Forrester for their excellence and performance. Connect with him on X (@gadget_ry) or Mastodon (@gadgetry@techhub.social)

Arm has introduced an open-source solution aimed at enhancing graphics upscaling on mobile devices. The solution promises to bring PC-quality gaming experiences to smartphones while optimising performance and power consumption.

‘Arm Accuracy Super Resolution’ (Arm ASR) is a temporal upscaler, which combines information from multiple frames to generate high-quality images from lower resolution targets. This approach allows game developers to render graphics at lower resolutions and then upscale them, resulting in significant performance improvements without sacrificing visual quality.

The company’s decision to develop a temporal upscaler was driven by the need to address common graphical performance challenges in mobile gaming.

Arm derived their solution from AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR2), the impressive open-source project that has proven successful in the PC and console gaming markets. By adapting this technology for mobile devices, Arm aims to provide developers with a familiar API and configuration options.

To demonstrate the capabilities of Arm ASR, the company conducted tests using a commercial mobile device featuring an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU with a display resolution of 2800×1260. The results showed substantial GPU performance improvements compared to rendering at native resolution:

Importantly, the upscaling technique allowed for high-quality rendering at stable, low temperatures, avoiding the thermal throttling issues that can negatively impact user experience during extended gaming sessions.

“Upscaling works by rendering some stages of the frame at lower resolution and then later applying the technique to scale from lower to higher resolution,” Arm explained.

“It should not be used at every step in rendering a frame, as it can lead to unsightly defects when rendering full screen effects or user interfaces. However, earlier in the pipeline it can be used to great effect and provide anti-aliasing as a part of the process.”

The performance enhancements achieved by Arm ASR translate directly into power savings, a crucial factor for mobile gaming.

In collaboration with MediaTek, Arm validated these power savings using a Dimensity 9300 handset, demonstrating significant reductions in power consumption compared to native full-resolution rendering:

Arm’s game content team also applied the ASR technology to their “Mori” demo, an Unreal Engine project designed to challenge future mobile GPUs. The results showcased the upscaler’s ability to preserve fine details while improving performance, utilising Robust Contrast-Adaptive Sharpening (RCAS) to enhance image quality further.

In alignment with the open-source ethos of projects like AMD’s GPUOpen, Arm has decided to release Arm ASR under an MIT open-source license. This decision allows developers to freely access and experiment with the technology in their own projects, potentially accelerating the adoption of high-quality upscaling in mobile games.

The release of Arm ASR represents a significant step forward in mobile graphics technology, offering developers a powerful tool to optimise their games for performance and power efficiency without compromising on visual quality.

As the mobile gaming industry continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible on handheld devices, solutions like Arm ASR will be instrumental in delivering immersive gaming experiences to players around the world.

(Photo by Ryland Dean)

Looking to revamp your digital transformation strategy? Learn more about Digital Transformation Week taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with AI & Big Data Expo, Cyber Security & Cloud Expo, and other leading events.

Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

Tags: accuracy super resolution, api, arm, arm asr, asr, coding, fsr2, game development, gaming, graphics, mobile, open source, open-source, programming