Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX Explained: How AI Makes Mobile Games Look Better

In this post, you will learn how Arm’s new GPU uses AI to sharpen game images, smooth out motion, and improve lighting.

This post was written with the help of an AI assistant to simplify the technology and make it easier to understand.

Mobile games could soon get much better graphics without making phones work significantly harder. Arm, whose processor architecture and designs power most smartphones, has introduced its next-generation Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU with native AI acceleration built specifically for graphics.

Instead of depending only on raw GPU power, the new GPU can use AI to improve how games look and run. Arm calls this neural graphics, and there are three main technologies behind it.

1. Neural Super Sampling

The first is Neural Super Sampling, or NSS. Instead of rendering a game directly at a very high resolution, the GPU can render it at a lower resolution first.

AI then reconstructs the missing details and produces a sharper, higher-resolution image. This means the GPU has to render fewer pixels while the player can still get a high-quality final image.

For example, instead of doing all the work required to create a high-resolution frame, the GPU can create a lighter version first. AI then helps turn that into something that looks much closer to the higher-quality image.

2. Neural Frame Rate Upscaling

The second improvement is Neural Frame Rate Upscaling, or NFRU. This feature uses AI to generate additional frames between frames that the GPU has actually rendered.

Think of a game where the GPU produces one frame and then another frame. AI looks at the movement between them and creates an intermediate frame, making the gameplay appear smoother.

It means developers may be able to achieve higher displayed frame rates without asking the GPU to traditionally render every single frame. Arm says combining its architectural improvements and NFRU can support longer gaming sessions at up to 120 FPS.

3. Better Ray Tracing With AI

The third technology is Neural Super Sampling and Denoising, or NSSD. It is mainly designed to help with demanding graphics such as ray-traced lighting, reflections, and shadows.

Ray tracing can make games look much more realistic, but it requires a lot of GPU power. NSSD lets the GPU calculate less information and then uses AI to clean up and reconstruct the final image.

Arm demonstrated these technologies in a project called Neural Dawn. In that demo, combining NFRU and NSSD delivered up to 4x higher performance efficiency and reduced external memory traffic by up to 70 percent compared with native rendering.

It Is Also a Faster GPU Normally

AI is not the only improvement Arm has made. Mali G2-Ultra NX also gets a completely new execution engine, which Arm says is its biggest GPU instruction-set upgrade in seven generations.

It can provide up to 2x more registers per warp, essentially giving the GPU more room to handle complicated graphics workloads. Arm claims up to 24 percent higher benchmark performance and 14 percent better non-AI gaming performance over the previous generation.

Ray Tracing Is Better Too

Arm has also added its third-generation ray-tracing unit. It is designed to handle more complicated lighting, reflections, shadows, and detailed objects while putting less pressure on the phone's memory.

A new feature called Opacity Micromaps can make objects such as grass, leaves, fabrics, and transparent surfaces easier to process. In one Arm demo, it improved frame rates by 30 percent while reducing the ray-tracing workload by up to 70 percent.

Overall, with this new technology, Arm can make mobile games significantly better in areas such as game quality, smoother frame rates, and better power efficiency, especially on smartphones where power, cooling, and battery capacity are limited.

But keep in mind that having the new Mali GPU does not mean these features will work with every game or on every device. Developers need to add support for Arm's neural graphics technologies before users can benefit from them.

The first device to use this technology is Xiaomi's 18 Fold, which comes with Xiaomi's custom Xring O3 chip and the Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU.

Arm is also providing development tools and support for engines such as Unreal Engine to make it easier for developers to add these features to their games.

What do you think about Arm's new mobile graphics technology? Let us know in the comments below.

Source: Arm’s Mali G2-Ultra NX announcement.