Arm has developed a new shader-based upscaler using AMD's open source FSR 2.2 as its starting base

pcgamer.com:

Processor designer Arm has created a new shader-based upscaler for mobile devices with tiny GPUs but high-resolution screens. What makes this one different to the likes of Qualcomm's Game Super Resolution and Nvidia's DLSS Super Resolution is that it's not only open-source itself but it's also been developed from the work of another open-source project: AMD's FSR 2.2 upscaler.

For better or worse, upscaling has become an expected feature in today's graphics-heavy games. Lowering the rendering resolution significantly helps to improve performance, because there are fewer pixels to process, but at the cost of a loss in visual fidelity. Upscalers are designed to mitigate this by having most of the frame rendering done at a low resolution, then scaling it back up to the monitor's resolution, before finishing off the final touches and presenting the frame.

Game developers can choose to implement a raft of different upscaling methods—some are reliant on having a specific bit of hardware in the gaming PC (e.g. Nvidia's DLSS Super Resolution requires a GeForce RTX graphics card), while others are entirely shader-based and only require a general level of GPU features.

One of the most widely employed upscalers is AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and over the years it's gone from being a basic spatial upscaler to a complex, multi-staged temporal system. Most discrete graphics cards can handle the shader routines with ease but tiny GPUs, especially those integrated into mobile devices' processors, aren't necessarily powerful enough.

To make matters worse, in the case of smartphones, those GPUs have to deal with a display that has an enormous number of pixels. Upscaling would be really useful here but if you don't have enough shader units then a complex temporal upscaler is out of the question and you're left with having to use a simple spatial one that doesn't produce nice results.

Hence why Arm has developed Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (Arm-ASR)—an upscaler that isn't