Arm today launched its own in-game upscaling technology, called Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR). The technology was designed with an MIT open-source license for mobile devices with the goal of – you guessed it – making games on phones look better while decreasing power consumption.
Arm’s ASR essentially uses the temporal upscaling method and if you’re wondering that sounds familiar, that’s because the chipmaker based it on AMD’s own FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR2) technology. Unlike spatial upscaling, which upscales from a single frame, temporal upscaling uses multiple frames to generate images at higher quality.
As a quick primer, Upscaling technology was first properly introduced back in 2018 with the launch of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 20 Series and Deep Learning Super Resolution, or DLSS. NVIDIA introduced the technology as a means of allowing gamers to run games at higher resolutions such as 4K or 1440p, upscaled from lower resolutions, albeit with a few quirks that persist today. Since then, AMD and even Intel have seen the benefits of upscaling, countering the green team’s offering with their own variation of it.
Getting back on point, Arm claims that with ASR turned on, its Immortalis-G720 GPU was able to generate 53% more frames on a 2,800 x 1,260 display, compared to rendering at native resolution. On MediaTek Dimensity 9300 SoC, which also runs its chips, it found that upscaling from a resolution of 540p used less power than running the same game at native 1080p.
And if you’re wondering if ASR will be making its way on to Arm-powered Windows laptops, it seems unlikely. Microsoft already has its own Automatic Super Resolution, and that is exclusive to Snapdragon X chips.
