ARM Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR), special temporal upscaling for low-power devices
Waking samurai GPU enthusiasts, there’s a new upscaling trend going on.
Today, ARM introduced a new upscaler for mobile devices. The company confirmed that it is an open-source solution intended for all developers working on ARM devices. ARM explained why it skipped spatial upscaling techniques (such as AMD’s FSR1) and jumped straight to temporal upscaling.
ARM engineers were inspired by FSR2, which is provided under the MIT license and allows other developers to participate in its development or create something entirely new. FSR2 was a starting point that encouraged ARM to focus on enabling higher reliability and better performance for low-power devices. These devices now power billions of units, many of which are smartphones running thousands of 3D games.
ARM says that temporal upscalers are more complex to implement, but the end result is better. The company took FSR2 code and started to customize it for their purposes. This allowed ARM to save a lot of engineering work and focus on important aspects, such as optimizations. The company also uses well-known APU configurations and has similar quality profiles.
ARM conducted a comparison using ARM Immortalis G720 graphics using a simple 3D scene at 2800×1260 resolution. Since both FSR2 and FSR1 are open source and usable on ARM, the company was able to generate a performance comparison chart.
ASR vs FSR vs GSR, Source: ARM
Unlike desktop PCs or laptops, which either plug directly into a wall socket or use much larger batteries, the focus for ASR is not only on higher performance, but also on battery life and low temperatures. Instead of rendering at native resolutions, games can be rendered at lower detail, which will reduce thermal throttling and improve the overall experience, ARM says in the official announcement.
ASR vs FSR, Source: ARM
The ARM team developed a demo with Unreal Engine (version not specified), and shared the following comparison results. It is worth noting that FSR2 is (surprisingly) absent from this comparison, perhaps because it resembled ASR.
ASR vs FSR vs GSR, Source: ARM
The ARM ASR joins a long list of upscaling technologies including FSR, GSR, TSR, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Game Super Resolution. Hopefully, mobile devices will see a unification of the API similar to Microsoft DirectSR rather than further market segmentation.
Source: ARM