Arm's ASR upscaler for mobile devices is finally available — Plugins planned for Unity and Unreal Engine

Months after announcement, Arm is finally making its ASR (Accuracy Super Resolution) upscaler open to developers to integrate into their games. At the GDC (Game Developer Conference) 2025, Arm promised pre-built and easy-to-integrate plugins for games developed using the Unity and Unreal Engine game engines by the end of the year. Arm's ASR fills a void in the Android gaming landscape, offering an open-source upscaling solution that was previously absent, thus lagging MetalFX in Apple's dugout.

It's important to understand that while Arm chips are traditionally found in smartphones, they've started to make their way to laptops like Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series SoCs. So it's not far-fetched to believe this technology will support those chips as well. ASR is built on AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 technology, and at its initial unveiling, Arm claimed 53% more FPS at 2x upscaling with the Immortalis-G720 GPU (Dimensity 8400 and 9300). At the same time, ASR is claimed to deliver power savings of 20% with ASR set to 2x upscaling using the quality preset.

Mobile upscalers can sacrifice visual fidelity for performance and/or battery life. Qualcomm's GSR using spatial upscaling was restricted by its hardware and game support, which limited its impact in the Android space. Since ASR is open-source, developers can tweak and finetune it to match their needs. Moreover, it is likely to be supported on a majority of Arm devices, irrespective of the vendor. In the "Mori" demo, Arm showed off ASR in Unreal Engine 5 delivering up to 30% more FPS, with no compromises to the visuals, according to the company.

As a part of their promotional efforts, Arm has introduced a new chapter in its Mali Manga series featuring ASR and to be honest, I could get used to reading PRs like this. Think of it like DLSS or FSR for your mobile devices, and game integration is expected to be simplified as Arm releases pre-baked plugins for Unity and Unreal Engine later this year. Game developers utilizing these engines should find ASR integration relatively straightforward. We anticipate support in leading titles such as Genshin Impact (Unity), Wuthering Waves (Unreal Engine), Fortnite (Unreal Engine), and the list goes on.

Due to its open-source nature, ASR can be integrated into other game engines as well but that will require increased developer efforts. Sticking to mobile-only SoCs, ASR should work on Qualcomm's Snapdragon, MediaTek's Dimensity, Google's Tensor, Samsung's Exynos, and Apple's A-series/M-series hardware. While we believe ASR should be as scalable as FSR 2 and support virtually all modern-day Arm hardware, the requirements depend on the developers and Arm itself, though they should be pretty lenient.