Arm Launches Super Resolution Technology for Smartphones, Significantly Enhancing Game Graphics Clarity/Frame Rate While Reducing Power Consumption

NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards on desktop platforms already support super resolution technology, and Intel's Iris Xe series graphics cards are currently developing their version of this feature. Super resolution technology helps to automatically enhance the resolution of videos that are of lower quality, thus improving the viewing experience.

In the smartphone sector, there hasn't been support for super resolution technology until now. Arm, along with AMD's super resolution technology FSR 2, has introduced super resolution technology for smartphones and has made it open source under the MIT license.

All developers and game publishers can use Arm's super resolution technology for free to optimize games, including enhancing image clarity and reducing power consumption during game play.

Below image: The change in video frame rate after enabling ASR, with gray representing the original baseline, blue for Arm-ASR, and both red and orange for AMD-FSR 2.

Below image: Power consumption comparison for games run with Arm-ASR.

Arm's super resolution technology, named Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR), is naturally focused on the gaming sector of smartphones.

The company claims that the ASR technology helps make game graphics look better and reduces phone power consumption. On an Arm G720 GPU and a device with a 2800*1260 resolution, the game frame rate increased by 53% after optimization with ASR.

When testing ASR on the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 chip, Arm noted that rendering at 540p resolution and upgrading to 1080p via ASR resulted in 50% lower power consumption compared to rendering directly at 1080p. This means a significant saving in battery life and improved battery endurance.

It's worth noting that Arm chips are primarily in the smartphone sector, but chips based on the Arm architecture are gradually entering the Windows 11 PC market. Arm's super resolution technology naturally supports PCs as well.

In Windows 11, Microsoft has developed an automatic super resolution feature, which can quickly enhance the clarity of videos and games on supported graphics cards. With Arm's support, the future of super resolution features on Windows 11 Arm devices is expected to improve even further.