Arm introduced the Mali G2-Ultra NX on September 8, bringing dedicated neural accelerators into the shader cores of its mobile GPU. The design is meant to give game studios more room for detailed graphics without overwhelming a phone's power and memory budgets.
Three techniques are central to the design. Neural Super Sampling reconstructs sharper images from lower-resolution renders. Neural Frame Rate Upscaling uses motion and depth information to generate intermediate frames. A third technique combines upscaling with denoising for ray-traced scenes, where realistic lighting can be expensive to render.
In Neural Dawn, a demonstration made with Sumo Digital, Arm reports up to four times higher performance efficiency and up to 70% less external memory traffic than native rendering. Arm also reports a 14% improvement in non-AI gaming performance against its previous GPU generation. Those figures describe Arm's reported comparisons, not results from independently tested retail phones.
The Arm Neural Graphics Development Kit provides a path for developers using Vulkan, Unreal Engine or custom engines to try these techniques.