AI upscaling is about to transform Android gaming forever

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Mobile graphics have increasingly closed the performance gap with integrated desktop-class GPUs and have even kept pace with cutting-edge rendering technologies and features typically found in gaming consoles and PCs. Ray tracing is one of the most recent examples, bringing a trimmed-down, lightweight version of the powerhouse lighting tech to our pockets at a fraction of the power draw.

But in the meantime, desktop-class GPUs have raced ahead with neural network-assisted resolution upscaling and frame-rate generation, enabling 4K/120 fps gameplay without the traditional rendering effort. Well, mobile is catching up here, too.

Your next smartphone could soon boast AI-assisted upscaling, if it features a newly unveiled Arm Mali NX GPU.

Before we get into the AI enhancements found in this year’s Mali graphics chips, we need to dive into the core architecture and portfolio change in the G2 series.

If you’re after the raw performance numbers, Arm lists quite a range of results. Gaming performance increases by 9% (Honkair Starrail) to 14% (Fortnite) when comparing the 14-core Mali G1-Ultra reference platform to the G2-Ultra equivalent (which also features a 1.53GHz versus 1.70GHz shader core clock difference). At the upper end, Arm expects we could see 17-20% performance improvements in the most demanding mobile graphics benchmarks.

Generation-on-generation improvements in general rasterization are reasonably modest, but that doesn’t mean things haven’t changed. The execution engines have been revamped to support much larger desktop-class shaders, with up to twice the registers per warp (now 128 instead of 64) and also more dynamic allocation, supporting 16 warp-wide steps from 16 to 128 registers. This allows advanced graphical shader technologies like Unreal 5’s Lumen and Nanite to run without register spilling and the associated performance drops from reaching out to DRAM. This marks Arm’s biggest change to Mali in seven generations.

The G2 architecture also sports Arm’s third-generation ray-tracing unit, which introduces a more compact triangle representation that uses shared edges to reduce data duplication and fit more geometry in the cache. Arm’s improvements this generation lower DRAM traffic by 13%, removing bottlenecks and improving energy efficiency.