Arm is finally rolling out their Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR) upscaler as plugins for games made in Unity and Unreal Engine game engines by the end of the year. This means that developers will be able to integrate them into their games in the near future.
Upscalers essentially allows games to be rendered at a lower resolution and upscales them to a higher (usually native) resolution. ASR is built upon AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR2). Arm’s technique focuses on temporal upscaling methods, which takes data from multiple frames with lower resolution to produce higher quality images. They say that they can deliver better results from finer details such as tree branches and edges.
According to their own in-house benchmarks with a device powered by an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU (Dimensity 8400 and 9300) at 2800 x 1260, Arm ASR is able to increase framerates by up to 53% compared to native resolution. This boost in performance translates into smoother gameplay and extended battery life.
To facilitate Arm ASR’s adoption, they have rolled it out as an open-source solution under the MIT license. They claim that it is compatible with major game engines and will be a plugin for the Unreal Engine 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5. A Unity plugin is in development and coming soon.
If correctly implemented, we may see increase performance in lower-end smartphones in graphically intensive games such as Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero, which use Unity as well as in Wuthering Waves which employes Unreal Engine.
It’s not far-off that ASR may arrive onto laptops given that Arm has found their way onto mainstream notebooks in the form of the Snapdragon X series chipsets. They will have considerable resistance, however, as Snapdragon X-based notebooks have access to other upscaling solutions such as FSR, XeSS, and Lossless Scaling.
