Arm, the British chip and software design powerhouse, recently staged its Arm Everywhere China showcase in Shanghai, unveiling a suite of fresh AI‑driven technologies aimed at reshaping graphics on mobile devices. The centerpiece of the announcement is a new, AI‑native compute platform called CSS for Mobile 2 and the Mali G2‑Ultra NX graphics processor, a GPU built around neural‑accelerated rendering.
Arm argues that this on‑device AI pipeline can lift visual fidelity while keeping power draw and heat generation far lower than traditional solutions, positioning it as a more transparent alternative to Nvidia’s controversial DLSS 5. While Arm did not name specific products that will ship with the Mali G2‑Ultra NX, the predecessor Mali G1‑Ultra has already found its way into phones from Xiaomi, Vivo and OnePlus, suggesting a similar market trajectory for the new silicon.
Deyan Lazarov, a senior engineer on Arm’s GPU team within the Edge AI division, explained that development on the Mali G2‑Ultra NX has spanned roughly two and a half years. The goal, he said, is to give mobile developers access to heavyweight rendering features—most notably ray tracing—without the thermal and battery penalties that have traditionally kept those techniques confined to desktop GPUs. "We’re seeing a real uptick in interest for ray tracing on phones," Lazarov noted.
"It was slow to gain traction at first, but more studios are now asking how they can bring that level of realism to handheld titles." The new GPU is already compatible with Unreal Engine’s advanced lighting system, MegaLights, and Arm has partnered with Sumo Digital to produce a demo game called Neural Dawn that showcases the chip’s capabilities. Lazarov described the target audience as developers who build "mobile‑first" experiences but still want their games to look as polished as PC or console releases. He also highlighted cross‑platform titles that aim to deliver a seamless visual experience whether the player is on a console at home or a phone on a commuter train.
To meet those ambitions, the Mali G2‑Ultra NX must operate within the strict thermal envelope and limited power budget of a battery‑driven device. "A phone can’t dump heat the way a console can, and it’s always running off a battery," he explained. Arm’s answer is a hybrid rendering pipeline that blends conventional rasterisation with neural‑network‑based reconstruction. By offloading a portion of the image‑generation work to dedicated neuro‑accelerators, the GPU can render fewer pixels directly and let the AI fill in the missing detail.
This reduces both the computational load and the energy consumption of the graphics core, freeing up resources that developers can reallocate toward higher resolution, smoother frame rates, or longer battery life. "The efficiency gains mean developers don’t have to make as many hard trade‑offs," Lazarov said. "They can choose to push visual fidelity, performance, power savings, or a mix of all three, depending on what their game needs." To make the technology attractive to creators, Arm is taking an open‑source stance.
Over the past two years the company has worked closely with the broader ecosystem to produce a suite of tools that are developer‑friendly. The core AI models—Neural Super Sampling (NSS), Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD), and Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU)—are all published publicly on GitHub and Hugging Face. Because the models are convolution‑based rather than generative, they simply learn how existing content should look, rather than inventing new visual information. This approach allows developers to fine‑tune the networks with their own art assets, ensuring that the upscaled or interpolated frames stay true to a game’s unique style.
Lazarov contrasted this openness with Nvidia’s DLSS 5, which he described as a closed, black‑box system that cannot be retrained on custom data. "Our networks are convolutional, they don’t hallucinate; they just know the correct appearance based on real‑world training data," he said. "Since the models are public, a studio can feed it examples from its own game, retrain the network, and be confident that the AI respects their artistic intent without risking IP loss." Another key differentiator is the mobile‑first design philosophy. Arm’s neural pipelines are engineered to respect the tight constraints of handheld hardware—limited power, bandwidth, and memory.
By contrast, DLSS would quickly exceed those limits on a phone, even if the software were ported. Lazarov emphasized that the Mali G2‑Ultra NX achieves up to four times the performance and efficiency of its predecessor, while slashing DRAM traffic by roughly 70 %, a major source of power draw on mobile SoCs.
In practical terms, the performance uplift is dramatic. The previous‑generation GPU could only push the Neural Dawn demo to about 40 fps under ideal conditions and dropped to 15 fps in typical gameplay.
The new Mali G2‑Ultra NX comfortably reaches 60 fps, delivering a buttery‑smooth experience. Arm is also providing development support through plugins for Unreal Engine, with plans to add Unity and other engines later. An SDK offers a streamlined integration path for studios using custom engines, and Arm claims that retrofitting an existing shipped title with its AI‑native graphics can be done in as little as three months. Several upcoming mobile titles are slated to leverage the Mali G2‑Ultra NX, including Tencent’s Arena Breakout Infinite, NetEase’s Where Winds Meet, and Infold Games’ Infinity Nikki.
These games will benefit from the chip’s ability to render high‑quality ray‑traced lighting, upscale resolution, and generate intermediate frames without taxing the battery. In summary, Arm’s mobile‑first AI reconstruction strategy offers a transparent, open, and power‑efficient alternative to Nvidia’s DLSS 5. By integrating neural accelerators directly into the rendering pipeline, providing publicly available models, and delivering robust tooling, Arm aims to empower developers to create console‑grade visuals on smartphones while preserving battery life and thermal comfort. The Mali G2‑Ultra NX represents a significant step toward that vision, promising higher frame rates, richer graphics, and a more flexible development workflow for the next generation of mobile games.