Arm Announces Open Source Graphics Scaling Software for Mobile Phones

Arm is introducing its own upscaler for mobile gaming. The chipmaker says Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR) can make games look better while reducing phone power consumption. It is also making the upscaler technology available to developers under the MIT open source license.

Upscaling is especially useful for lower-powered graphics cards that otherwise wouldn’t be able to run the game at a playable frame rate. 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 can have a big impact on battery life.

You can see how Arm ASR compares to AMD and Qualcomm’s FSR 2 GSR technology in the above chart created by Arm. Arm claims that ASR generated 53 percent higher frames per second than rendering at native resolution on a device with an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU and a 2800 x 1260 display, beating AMD FSR 2.

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