Resolution upscaling technology is very common in PC and console games nowadays, and smartphone chipmakers has been slowly introducing their equivalent technology as well. Qualcomm has its Snapdragon Game Super Resolution (Snapdragon GSR), and now Arm is introducing its offering called Arm Accuracy Super Resolution, or Arm ASR for short.
Arm ASR (Accuracy Super Resolution)
Arm ASR is based on AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR2), which is a temporal-based upscaling method used to boost performance by upscaling the lower input resolution (which requires less compute power to run) to the monitor’s native resolution. The key here is that Arm ASR is optimized for low-power devices like smartphones and tablets, which allows it to perform better than the PC-bound FSR2 in the same resolution.
If you flip the perspective around and focus on efficiency, Arm ASR can provide power savings as less power is required to deliver the same amount of framerate. In Arm’s tests, the power reduction range from 20% to 30% depending on which quality mode is chosen. With lower power consumption comes greater battery life, which is obviously one of the key metrics of a smartphone.
Arm also notes that its upscaling method provides better quality over spatial upscalers like AMD FSR1 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon GSR, which loses more fine details than Arm’s implementation, which uses temporal upscaling. In the comparison image shown below, Arm ASR is reasonably close to the native image (ground truth), especially in fur-like textures.
The benefit may extend beyond smartphones and tablets, however. As Arm is responsible for various chipmaker’s SoC designs (namely MediaTek), Arm ASR may find its way into future Windows on Arm machines once the exclusivity deal between Microsoft and Qualcomm ends next year, which should allow companies like MediaTek to officially enter the laptop market.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
Pokdepinion: Given that smartphones displays is already small, using upscaler sounds like a no-brainer to me.
