Arm announces an open-source graphics upscaler for mobile phones

Arm is launching its own upscaler for mobile gaming. The chip designer says its Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR) can make games look better, while lowering power consumption on your phone. It’s also making the upscaling technology available to developers under an MIT open-source license.

Upscaling is especially useful for lower-powered graphics cards that couldn’t otherwise run a game at playable frame rates. AMD FSR, Nvidia DLSS, and Intel XeSS are all upscalers that work on desktop and laptop GPUs. Arm ASR is one of the few that will work on mobile phones, which could have a major impact on battery life.

You can see just how Arm ASR stacks up to AMD’s FSR 2 and Qualcomm’s GSR tech in the above chart created by Arm. Arm claims ASR produced 53 percent higher frame rates than rendering at native resolution on a device with an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU and 2800 x 1260 display, beating AMD FSR 2.

It also tested ASR on a device using MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 chip and found that rendering at 540p and upscaling with ASR used much less power than running a game at native 1080p resolution.