Arm's Neural Super Sampling: A Game-Changer for Mobile Graphics and AI

Arm juices mobile GPUs with neural tech for better graphics

Designs scheduled for launch in 2026, developer kit for programmers out today Chip designer Arm is bringing dedicated neural accelerator hardware to its GPU blueprints used in phones. It expects this to deliver higher quality visuals while boosting AI performance. The UK-based tech biz says that its mobile graphics processor designs, scheduled to be launched in 2026, will feature neural tech that can cut GPU workloads in half and allow for other AI capabilities in future. Arm also announced a developer kit so programmers can start getting to grips with it today, plus ML Extensions for the Vulkan Graphics API. Arm initially sees neural acceleration being used for upscaling graphics to a higher resolution, without affecting performance. Other envisioned uses are doubling the frame rate using interpolation, and improving image quality by enabling real-time path tracing on mobile devices using fewer rays per pixel. "As AI increasingly merges with real time graphics, we need GPU-based AI that's tightly integrated, performant and most importantly, power efficient. And making AI on GPUs easy for developers is what's driven the technical innovations that we're talking about here," said Geraint North, Arm Fellow in AI and Developer Platforms. Arm declined to share any detailed technical information on the neural accelerators before the Mali GPUs that will include them are announced. However, it will fit inside the shader cores in each GPU, thus the neural performance should scale in line with the number of shader cores in a particular GPU implementation. Arm's 5th Gen designs could scale from five cores or fewer up to a maximum of 16. Last year, the chip designer announced its current upscaling technology, Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (Arm ASR). This allows a game to render a lower resolution image and apply an algorithm to upscale, reducing the processing cost of a frame while preserving quality. To improve on this, Arm is punting Neural Super Sampling (NSS) powered by its accelerator hardware, which enables upscaling from 540p resolution to 1080p in 4ms per frame, saving up to 50 percent of the GPU workload compared with rendering the full frame, the firm claims. "It's real time AI driven rendering. It's faster, it's sharper, it's more power efficient. So NSS can produce the equivalent quality output with lower quality inputs, or it can produce better quality output with the same inputs," North said. Arm is also working on other applications, as mentioned above, including Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU) and Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD). The first is designed to improve frame rates by taking a pair of consecutive frames and generating an intermediate frame. "The neural network is also tightly coupled with new hardware that we'll be adding to our GPUs to accelerate the generation of motion vectors, which track how the pixels are moving between frames. And this will allow content running at 30 FPS to be really cheaply upscaled to 60 FPS," North added. NSSD is intended to produce image quality expected from full path ray tracing, which is far too computationally expensive even on desktop systems, according to North, "but when you couple path tracing with a neural network, you can actually cast only a handful of rays per pixel into the scene, and you can use neural technology to add back in those missing details. So the neural network is able to extrapolate data, not only from adjacent pixels, but also from previous frames." Enabling all this is a neural graphics development kit, which Arm says it is making available today so game developers can get a head start on integrating AI-powered graphics before the hardware is available. The kit comprises plugins for Unreal Engine that allow devs to incorporate neural super sampling into a game "with just a few clicks," with the models available in open formats via GitHub and Hugging Face. There is also a full PC emulation of the Arm ML Vulkan extensions, allowing developers to run the entire stack ahead of the mobile hardware being ready. This isn't the first time neural tech has been infused into phone chips. It is already widely used to power camera features, and Arm licensee Qualcomm has been pushing the AI capabilities of its smartphone platforms thanks to neural processing units (NPUs) it embedded into its processors. At MWC last year, Qualy showed off a 7 billion parameter large language model running on an Android phone, and unveiled its AI Hub for developers. When asked if its latest tech could be used for other purposes, North said that programming model (Vulkan) is different and is graphics-first, but not exclusively graphic-focused and could theoretically be used for some inferencing. "We're super excited to see what people do with it," he said. The question is, will others share that enthusiasm? ®

ARM's New Neural Upscaler Could Finally Make Gaming on Phones Exciting Again

Maybe we'll finally see bigger games play well on smartphones. Today’s PCs don’t have to be so powerful to get strong performance out of games, and it’s mostly due to occasionally derided but increasingly ubiquitous AI upscaling. For those of us who dream of their smartphones as true gaming powerhouses, chip designer ARM promises that with this same tech, we may finally play big-name titles right from our pockets. You may not know much about ARM technology, but if you've used most smartphones or many of today's PCs and Macs, you've seen the group's impact. ARM is the creator of much of today’s chip microarchitectures that it then licenses to other companies. Multiple major smartphone manufacturers, including Apple and Qualcomm, have their chips on ARM's RISC instruction set, which has notably been cheaper to produce while demanding less power to run well. On Tuesday, ARM laid out details for neural technology it's planning to stick on future chips, which is what will power its own unique AI upscaling technique. Essentially, ARM is introducing a new flavor of AI upscaling, which takes a frame rendered at a lower resolution and uses AI to upscale it to a higher fidelity, all while keeping the enhanced performance. What makes it special is how "Neural Super Sampling" is built specifically for the small smartphone form factor. Last year, ARM introduced its Accuracy Super Resolution technology. This is what’s called a “temporal†upscaler, which uses information from multiple frames to generate the upscaled image. The chip architecture designers said that temporal super samplers are hard to scale, but “Neural Super Sampling†is something built for mobile. It’s running on trained AI models that help generate the majority of the pixels from an image rendered at 540p and upscaled to 1080p. ARM claims this technique creates visuals that look close to what’s rendered without any softened edges or muddy textures. Today’s largest PC chip and graphics card makers, including AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, all promote their own super sampling technology. Early examples of the tech, including Nvidia’s first versions of DLSS, or deep learning super sampling, could introduce a bevy of graphical glitches that would hinder the experience despite the better performance. Today’s tech, including DLSS 4 and AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR), is so close to native rendering that some games set upscaling on by default. While some past upscalers have been hardware agnostic, DLSS and FSR prove that super sampling created specifically for the hardware will inevitably produce much better results, both in performance and visual fidelity. That’s why ARM's version may prove so dramatic for future smartphones. More players game on mobile worldwide than on both PC and console. Games like Honkai Star Rail and PUBG Mobile don’t have system requirements that demand much power, and most modern phones can run each of these games without issue. The problem is trying to get big-budget AAA games to run on such small devices. I’ve seen Resident Evil 4 played on an iPhone 16 Pro, and it’s hard to ignore the lack of detail, muddy textures, and jagged lines compared to the same game played on even a moderately powerful laptop. There's also a chance Neural Super Sampling could vastly improve battery life on smartphones when playing intensive 3D games. Titles like Honkai normally chew through battery life when rendering the game at the maximum resolution. ARM’s new AI upscaler tech is all still pie in the sky until chipmakers and game developers start to take it into account. Upscalers can introduce latency into a game caused by the time it takes for the hardware to process the upscaled frame, which could create a sense of lag when in game. Some chip designs may introduce more lag depending on how makers configure the next-gen GPU, or graphics processing unit. Chipmakers also need to actually enable the neural hardware on future chips, which means we won’t see this technology for at least another year, if not more. Developers also have to get on board. Though ARM said it's providing extras like a plugin for Unreal Engine 5â€"one of the most popular game engines todayâ€"game makers need to test what kind of performance uplift they could get from Neural Super Sampling. The audiences for mobile and traditional platforms like PC and console are distinct. Publishers and developers will need to know that this tech works, that there will be enough phone chips using it, and that the audience is there and hungry for bigger and better phone games before any of them put in the work to add Neural Super Sampling compatibility. There are reasons to be optimistic. Our phones are already powerful enough; they may be outstripping older consoles. HoYoverse, the developers behind Genshin Impact, said it was removing the game from the PlayStation 4 because of "limitations related to hardware performance and platform application size." It's still available for iPhone and Android.

Arm Neural Super Sampling brings AI-powered DLSS-like upscaling to mobile devices

TL;DR: Arm introduces Neural Super Sampling (NSS), an AI-powered mobile gaming technology that enhances image quality and performance by upscaling from 540p to 1080p with minimal latency. Launching in 2026, NSS reduces GPU workload by up to 50%, enabling higher frame rates, better visuals, and improved energy efficiency on Arm GPUs. Arm is bringing DLSS-like AI Super Resolution to mobile gaming with its new and impressive Arm Neural Super Sampling (NSS) technology. It builds on Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (Arm ASR) technology that is already available, improving image fidelity and performance by leveraging neural accelerators on Arm GPUs that are on track to launch sometime in 2026. Arm Neural Super Sampling (NSS) technology demo upscaling from 540p to 1080p. Even though the hardware for this is still a year away, the company is all-in on bringing AI-powered rendering to mobile gamers on day one, as NSS already has its own Unreal Engine plugin with PC-based Vulkan emulation and Vulkan ML extensions. The NSS model, which Arm says delivers DLSS 2-like image quality on a low-power mobile device, is compact and open-source. Arm notes that developers and companies like Enduring Games, Epic Games, NetEase Games, Sumo Digital, Tencent Games, and Traverse Research are already working to add NSS support to games and apps. As a mobile-focused tech, it's designed to reduce GPU workloads by up to 50% while maintaining native-like image fidelity. Arm adds that using NSS to upscale from 540p to 1080p has a latency cost of just 4ms, with the company's Enchanted Castle demo showcasing the quality of the output it delivers. With native-like image quality, NSS can be used to boost efficiency or push mobile gaming visuals to new heights. "Developers can save up to 50% of the GPU workload compared with rendering the full frame using traditional methods, and either bank that saving to reduce the overall power consumption of their game, spend it on delivering a higher frame rate, or increase the quality of the visuals," Arm writes. "With NSS, developers can use AI to preserve surface detail, lighting, and motion clarity, giving them the flexibility to balance visual fidelity with energy efficiency depending on their game's needs." Even more exciting is that Arm is also working on Neural Frame Rate Upscaling, its version of DLSS Frame Generation, as well as Neural Super Sampling and Denoising technology, its version of DLSS Ray Reconstruction, to enable real-time path tracing on mobile devices. The company's existing Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (Arm ASR) technology is based on AMD's open-source FSR 2; however, this new variant looks to be an AI-enhanced extension of ASR in the same way FSR 4 is an AI-enhanced version of FSR 3.1. With AMD's impressive AI-powered FSR 4 currently limited to its desktop RDNA 4 GPUs, it's surprising to see Arm pull ahead on mobile rendering, as AMD's APUs have yet to adopt neural rendering technologies for gaming.

Arm's Neural Super Sampling Brings DLSS-Like AI Upscaling to Mali GPUs, Boosting Mobile Gaming with Sharper Graphics, Higher Frame Rates, and Better Battery Life Starting in 2026

Mobile gaming and graphics are about to get a serious boost thanks to Arm's latest Neural Super Sampling technology, which was showcased at SIGGRAPH 2025. The AI-powered upscaling technology is designed to bring desktop-class visuals to mobile devices by cleverly combining lower-resolution renderings with advanced neural network processing. Baked into the next generation of Mali GPUs, the Arm Neural Technology aims to revolutionize how Android flagships and gaming phones handle graphics, delivering sharper images, smoother frame rates, while maintaining, if not improving, battery life. If you are not familiar, Neural Super Sampling works by rendering frames at a reduced resolution, and Arm demonstrated the upscaling from 540p to 1080p, which was then fed to a trained neural network running on dedicated on-chip accelerators. The AI reconstructs images that look very close to native resolution but with much less power and processing demand. Arm's early testing shows that the entire upscaling process can happen in just 4 milliseconds per frame, which is quite promising for keeping frame rates high without draining battery life. One of the key benefits of the technology is how it reduces artifacts common in older upscaling methods, such as smearing or ghosting. Arm's new NSS offers smoother and cleaner visuals by leveraging the neural network's ability to fill in the details, which ultimately creates a more immersive gaming experience on mobile devices. Apart from gaming, these neural accelerators can also improve other graphics-heavy mobile applications, including real-time ray tracing denoising and AI-enhanced camera features. Arm's Neural Super Sampling works much like NVIDIA's DLSS technology, as both use AI-powered neural networks to upscale lower-resolution frames to higher resolution, reducing GPU workload while maintaining high-quality visuals. The difference is that DLSS runs on NVIDIA's Tensor Cores in desktop GPUs, while NSS uses dedicated neural accelerators built into Mali GPUs, which are optimized only for mobile devices. This will allow Android phones to enjoy DLSS-style performance and efficiency gains on the go. Arm is also providing developers with an open Neural Graphics Development Kit well before the hardware hits the shelves. The toolkit includes an Unreal Engine plugin, Vulkan-based PC emulation, updated profiling tools, and Hugging Face integration. Early access to the toolkit will allow developers and app creators to experiment and optimize their software for the upcoming hardware, ensuring a smooth rollout when devices with Arm Neural Technology launch. Arm also plans to expand the technology with features like Neural Frame Rate Upscaling and Neural Super Sampling Denoising in 2026, which will push graphics performance even further.