Arm introduced this Tuesday (8) the Mali G2-Ultra NX, its first Mali GPU with dedicated neural accelerators integrated into graphics processing. The architecture uses artificial intelligence to reconstruct images, generate intermediate frames, and improve ray-traced scenes, bringing to smartphones techniques already used in PC GPUs.
According to the company, the new GPU achieves up to 24% more performance in benchmarks and up to 14% gain in games that do not use the new AI features, compared with the previous generation. With neural processing enabled, Arm says certain graphics workloads can reach four times more performance within the same power budget.
The main change is the integration of neural accelerators directly into the GPU's shader cores. This allows AI tasks to share memory, caches, and control structures with the rest of the graphics pipeline, reducing data movement and the cost of running models during gameplay.
Supported technologies include Neural Super Sampling (NSS), which renders the game at a lower resolution and uses AI to reconstruct a higher-resolution image. Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU) creates intermediate frames from already rendered frames, while NSSD combines resolution reconstruction and noise reduction in ray-traced scenes.
AI takes on part of the rendering work
Arm says the combination of architectural improvements with neural frame generation can sustain games at up to 120 FPS. In the Neural Dawn demo, developed with Sumo Digital, the use of neural technologies also reduced external memory traffic by up to 70% compared with native rendering.
The GPU also received the third generation of Arm's ray tracing unit. Hardware support for Opacity Micromaps, a technique aimed at processing transparent and complex geometries, reduced the ray tracing workload by up to 70% and increased the frame rate by up to 30% in a company demo.
The hardware arrives after Arm began preparing its neural graphics ecosystem ahead of the GPU's launch. Tencent Games and Unity China are among the companies working on integrating the technology, while titles such as Where Winds Meet, Infinity Nikki and Arena Breakout Infinite are already part of the first projects announced by the company.
The Mali G2-Ultra NX is part of the new platform Arm CSS for Mobile 2, created to combine graphics processing and AI workloads executed directly on the device. For games, the change places techniques such as neural reconstruction, frame generation, and more advanced ray tracing within the architecture of future mobile platforms, reducing the need to render each pixel and each frame using the traditional method.
