Arm Unveils Proprietary Mobile-Optimized ASR Scaling Technology Based on AMD’s FSR 2

In short: Arm has introduced a new upscaling technology designed specifically for mobile devices. Arm Accuracy Super Resolution, or Arm ASR for short, is based on AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2) upscaler. It is a temporal upscaler, meaning it combines information from multiple frames to generate output.

On the other hand, spatial upscalers operate on a frame-by-frame basis and generally have lower requirements. The temporal approach can be more expensive from a computational perspective, but often provides higher quality results from lower resolution source material.

Early benchmark results look promising. A commercially available device powered by an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU (2800 x 1260 display resolution) with an Arm ASR upscaler outperformed all other techniques when rendering a modified version of the popular bistro scene. According to Arm, the relative frame rate with 2x upscaling was 53 percent higher compared to the device’s native performance.

Arm ASR also provides significant power savings. In the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 phone, the upscaler (in performance mode) reduced power consumption by about 25 percent. That may not sound like much, but in a mobile device where thermal throttling is a major concern and battery life is limited, such savings will provide a smoother overall experience and longer uptime. Reduced power consumption also means devices run cooler and feel more comfortable in the hand.

The new Arm upscaler has many advantages, not just in terms of performance. Because it’s based on FSR2, the API and configuration options should be familiar to developers who have already worked with AMD’s solution.

Best of all, Arm is releasing the technology to the community under the MIT open-source license. Interested parties are invited to contact us to become early adopters. We can’t wait to see what developers will be able to do with it.

Arm isn’t the first company to develop an upscaler for mobile devices. In April 2023, Qualcomm introduced Snapdragon Game Super Resolution (GSR), a single-pass, spatially aware upscaler that supports most GPUs but is optimized for Adreno chips.