At GDC, Arm introduced ASR (Accuracy Super Resolution), an upscaling technology designed to enhance mobile gaming performance while maintaining visual fidelity and battery efficiency.
For years, mobile game developers have struggled to balance graphics quality and performance. With ASR, this challenge becomes less of a concern.
Initially announced last year, Arm ASR is now accessible to all mobile game developers, with Unreal Engine and Unity plugins expected to launch later this year.
What exactly is Arm ASR?
ASR is an advanced upscaling solution developed by Arm to improve gaming performance while preserving visual fidelity. It achieves this by rendering certain frame stages at a lower resolution before intelligently upscaling them.
This approach reduces GPU workload and power consumption, enabling the use of complex graphics and advanced lighting effects on mobile devices.
As a result, developers can create visually richer mobile games while optimizing resource usage and mitigating thermal throttling—an issue that can degrade gaming performance.
To drive adoption and innovation, Arm ASR is available as an open-source solution under the MIT license, allowing developers worldwide to explore its potential and enhance their games.
Arm ASR: Bridging the gap between performance and fidelity
Arm ASR is built upon AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR2) technology, originally developed to bridge the performance gap between PC and console gaming with portable upscaling solutions.
Arm has adapted this technology to meet the specific needs of mobile platforms, incorporating highly efficient shaders that significantly reduce GPU load and memory bandwidth usage. This optimization is particularly advantageous for devices with limited memory bandwidth, allowing for notable performance improvements.
For visual output, Arm ASR utilizes temporal upscaling, which leverages data from multiple consecutive frames to produce higher-quality images from lower-resolution inputs. This method provides developers with familiar APIs and configuration options, ensuring seamless integration.
In practical tests, Arm ASR has shown superior results in rendering fine details such as thin tree branches and sharp edges, delivering more precise and visually appealing graphics.
Benchmark tests on a complex scene rendered at 2800×1260 resolution on a device powered by an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU demonstrated the impressive performance of Arm ASR. The technology delivered a 53% increase in frame rates compared to native resolution rendering.
This boost results in smoother, more responsive gameplay and extended battery life—both essential for an optimal mobile gaming experience.
Major game engines and studios embrace Arm ASR
Arm has focused on compatibility, ensuring seamless integration of Arm ASR with major game engines. A plugin for Unreal Engine 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 is currently available on Epic’s Fab store, while a Unity plugin is in active development and will be released soon.
The capabilities of Arm ASR were showcased in the ‘Mori’ demo, an Unreal Engine 5 project that leveraged its advanced desktop renderer for mobile. The results demonstrated ASR’s ability to preserve intricate visual details while boosting performance.
As seen in the accompanying video, enabling the Arm ASR plugin within Unreal Engine improved frames-per-second (FPS) by up to 30%, delivering enhanced performance and significant power savings without any noticeable loss in visual quality.
Integrating Arm ASR into Unreal Engine is designed to be simple. Developers only need to enable the Arm ASR plugin, configure their project settings to use Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA), and verify the integration using console commands.
To support developers, Arm provides comprehensive documentation, sample code, and detailed integration guides through an Arm Learning Path and a dedicated tutorial video. These resources ensure a smooth implementation of Arm ASR in game projects.
Several leading game studios, including Enduring Games, Infold Games, and Sumo Digital, have already adopted Arm ASR, reporting enhanced game performance while maintaining high visual quality.
Powering the future of mobile gaming
Plans are underway to expand Arm ASR’s compatibility across more platforms, allowing a broader community of developers to benefit from its capabilities.
Future updates will focus on further performance optimizations and the introduction of new features, guided by developer feedback and advancements in technology.
Arm ASR marks a significant advancement in mobile gaming, enabling developers to achieve high performance without compromising visual quality.
By adopting this open-source technology, developers can create immersive and smooth gaming experiences while addressing the challenge of thermal throttling on mobile devices.
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