Smartphones could soon require over 20 per cent less power when gaming
12.7.2024
Translation: machine translated
Chip designer Arm is launching its own upscaling technology for mobile gaming. "Accuracy Super Resolution" is designed to make games look better on smartphones while reducing power consumption.
Upscaling technologies are already widely used in PC gaming, but there have been hardly any available for smartphones until now. Arm is making its Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR) available to game developers under an open source licence. This means it could be widely used.
58 per cent higher frame rate with up to 30 per cent less energy consumption
The new technology from Arm is based on "FidelityFX Super Resolution 2" (FSR 2) from AMD. This uses so-called temporal upscaling to make PC games look better and increase the frame rate. In contrast to spatial upscaling, several frames are used instead of individual images.
Source: Arm
According to Arm, the new technology increases frame rates by 38 to 53 per cent. This is slightly better than Qualcomm's "Game Super Resolution" (GSR), the only other relevant upscaling technology for smartphones. The following specifications apply to a Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU and a resolution of 2800 × 1260 pixels. The higher frame rates are possible because the game is calculated in a lower resolution and then "blown up" to the higher resolution using upscaling technology.
Source: Arm
While GSR is only available for Snapdragon chips, Arm has also tested ASR on a Dimensity 9300 chipset from Mediatek. In particular, the power consumption of the GPU was reduced. However, upscaling has hardly any influence on the energy consumption of the CPU, memory and other things. Nevertheless, the overall power consumption was reduced by 20 to 30 per cent.
Source: Arm
Upscaling is becoming increasingly important for mobile devices
Upscaling technologies such as FSR from AMD, Nvidia DLSS or Intel XeSS have so far only been available for graphics cards in PCs and notebooks. ASR from Arm could in turn find its way from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets into notebooks. With the new notebooks with the Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus, there are laptops with Arm-based chipsets. These could incorporate the new technologies.
Microsoft already offers upscaling with "Automatic Super Resolution" for Copilot+ devices. It allows some games to be played with the laptops' onboard graphics chips that I wouldn't have expected. However, the latest titles are not on the list of supported games.
Header image: Jan Johannsen
As a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus.