ARM discussed an upcoming innovation in its Mali mobile GPU. Branded "embedded," it will receive a neural accelerator to improve image quality and increase frame rates. A company representative described how this will impact mobile gaming.
ARM graphics cores can be used in a variety of devices, such as laptops, smartphones, tablets, and handheld game consoles. The neural modules in future proprietary chips will be capable of:
Upscaling (in the spirit of DLSS/FSR);
Interpolating intermediate frames to improve smoothness;
Supporting real-time path tracing technology.
To enable this upscaling capability, Neural Super Sampling (NSS) technology was developed. According to ARM, it can upscale images from 1080p to 4K in just 540 milliseconds per frame while reducing the load on the GPU by 50%. The company already has an upscaling technology called Arm Precision Super Resolution (Arm ASR), but it is less effective because it works without the neural accelerator.
To boost frame rates, future Mali chips will use Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU) technology, which generates a new intermediate frame from two consecutive frames. This is expected to make it possible to increase frame rates from 30 fps to 60 fps "very cheaply" in terms of resources.
Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD) will be responsible for path tracking. According to Geraint North, an AI and Developer Platform researcher at ARM, the quality of the initial data may be lower than without the neural cores.
ARM spoke generally about the neural accelerator, with details to be revealed after the company releases its next-generation GPU in 2026. But developers can get started now with the new tools: an Unreal Engine plugin, models available on GitHub and Hugging Face, and emulation of the Arm ML Vulkan extension for PC.
