Arm, the UK‑based semiconductor and software design firm, staged its Arm Everywhere China showcase in Shanghai this week to announce a suite of new AI‑focused technologies aimed at the mobile market. The centerpiece of the announcement is a complete AI‑native computing ecosystem that includes the CSS for Mobile 2 compute platform and the brand‑new Mali G2‑Ultra NX graphics processor.
This GPU is built around neural‑accelerator blocks and is billed as delivering higher graphics performance while consuming far less power and generating less heat than conventional mobile GPUs. While Arm did not name specific handset models that will ship with the Mali G2‑Ultra NX, the predecessor Mali G1‑Ultra already powers devices from brands such as Xiaomi, Vivo and OnePlus, suggesting that the new chip could appear in a similar range of flagship and premium phones. Deyan Lazarov, a senior member of Arm’s GPU product team within the Edge AI division, explained that the Mali G2‑Ultra NX has been in development for roughly two and a half years.
Its design goal is to give mobile developers access to compute‑heavy features—most notably real‑time ray tracing—without the prohibitive power and thermal costs that have traditionally limited such capabilities on phones. "We’re seeing a clear uptick in interest from mobile game studios for ray‑tracing support," Lazarov said. "The technology was slow to catch on at first, but now more titles are actively looking to enable it." According to GamesIndustry.biz, the new GPU integrates tightly with Unreal Engine tools like MegaLights, and Arm has partnered with Sumo Digital to produce a demo title called *Neural Dawn* that showcases the chip’s abilities. Lazarov described the target audience as developers who create "mobile‑first" games but want their visual quality to approach that of desktop‑class experiences.
He also highlighted cross‑platform titles that aim for a consistent look and feel whether they are played on a console at home or on a phone during a commute. A handful of upcoming games have already committed to using the Mali G2‑Ultra NX, including Tencent’s *Arena Breakout Infinite*, NetEase’s *Where Winds Meet* and Infold Games’ *Infinity Nikki*. Lazarov noted that mobile devices face unique constraints: they cannot dissipate heat like consoles or PCs and must run continuously on battery power. To address these limits, Arm’s solution blends neural processing with the conventional graphics pipeline.
By offloading portions of the rendering workload to dedicated neural accelerators, the GPU can cut both compute demand and power draw, which in turn improves overall system efficiency. "The result is a new level of efficiency that eases many of the trade‑offs developers normally have to make," Lazarov explained.
"They can spend the saved budget on higher visual fidelity, smoother performance, longer battery life, or any combination of those goals." Arm is backing this vision with an open‑software strategy and a toolbox of developer resources. Over the past two years the company has been collaborating with ecosystem partners to create AI‑native graphics that are "developer‑friendly" and publicly accessible. The core technologies include Neural Super Sampling (NSS), Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD) and Neural Frame‑Rate Upscaling (NFRU). These techniques allow the system to upscale lower‑resolution images, add extra rays for better lighting, and generate additional frames through AI‑driven reconstruction.
Lazarov illustrated the process with a two‑frame example. In the first frame, the GPU renders only a quarter of the final image while the neural accelerators reconstruct the remaining three‑quarters using NSS. In the second frame, the GPU does no traditional rendering at all; every pixel is produced by the neural engines, resulting in a fully AI‑reconstructed frame.
Nvidia’s competing DLSS 5 technology also uses AI to enhance image detail, but it has drawn criticism for its "black‑box" nature and for sometimes diverging from the artistic intent of developers. Arm deliberately distances itself from that model. "Our networks are not generative; they are convolutional and trained on real content," Lazarov said. "They don’t invent new details—they simply know how the content should look.
All of our models are open‑source on GitHub and Hugging Face, so developers can inspect, retrain, and tailor them to their own art styles without risking IP loss." By contrast, DLSS is proprietary and closed, leaving developers with a take‑it‑or‑leave‑it choice. Arm’s open approach means a studio can capture data from its own quirky visual style, fine‑tune the network, and ensure that upscaled frames preserve the intended look.
Another key distinction is that Arm designed its AI pipeline from the ground up for mobile constraints—power, bandwidth and memory budgets are baked into the network architecture. "If you tried to run DLSS on a phone, you’d instantly exceed the power envelope," Lazarov warned. Power efficiency is a major selling point for the Mali G2‑Ultra NX.
Arm reports up to four‑fold gains in both performance and efficiency, plus a 70 % reduction in DRAM traffic, which is a major source of power consumption on handheld devices. Less memory access translates directly into longer battery life. In a practical benchmark, the previous‑generation GPU could only push *Neural Dawn* to about 40 fps at its limit and dropped to roughly 15 fps under normal conditions.
The new Mali G2‑Ultra NX, however, runs the same demo smoothly at 60 fps, demonstrating the real‑world impact of the AI‑assisted rendering pipeline. For developers, Arm currently offers Unreal Engine plug‑ins and plans to expand support to other engines, with Unity integration on the roadmap. A recent partnership with Unity China signals that Unity support is forthcoming.
Lazarov emphasized that while custom engines may not receive dedicated plug‑ins, Arm provides a comprehensive SDK that enables straightforward integration of its AI graphics stack. Existing titles can also benefit from the technology.
Arm claims that retrofitting a shipped game with its AI‑native graphics can be accomplished in as little as three months, giving studios a rapid path to improve visual quality, performance, or power efficiency without rebuilding the game from scratch. The *Neural Dawn* demo itself was built by a small team of fewer than 20 people in under 18 months, illustrating how Arm’s tools can accelerate development cycles. Overall, Arm’s mobile‑first AI reconstruction strategy aims to give developers a transparent, customizable, and power‑aware alternative to the closed, desktop‑centric solutions that dominate the current market.