Qualcomm announces Snapdragon Game Super Resolution, a scaling technique to improve performance and autonomy

Qualcomm has announced Snapdragon Game Super Resolution (GSR), a spatial scaling technique that aims to improve mobile gaming performance and device battery life. The technology, which is already in the hands of developers, has support for Unreal Engine 5 and is compatible with most GPUs, but unsurprisingly offers better performance on Snapdragon platforms due to being optimized for the drives. graphics processing Adreno.

Snapdragon GSR is a super-resolution technique that like other scaling features allows a game to be displayed at a higher resolution than it runs natively, while increasing visual quality and frame rate. (FPS). For example, a 1080p mobile game can be displayed in crisp 4K, while a title that only reaches 30 FPS can go up to 60 FPS for smoother gameplay. This increase in performance is not associated with higher consumption, so GSR also helps extend the battery of the mobile device.

Qualcomm compares Snapdragon GSR to bilinear interpolation (bilerp), a common scaling technique that works well in reducing power consumption but at the cost of losing image quality, and FSR 1.0, an open source super-resolution technology created by AMD. In this second case, Qualcomm claims that GSR is better because it uses fewer ALU instructions and texture samples. This allows to optimize the use of the shader, resulting in less frametime (the time that elapses between one frame being rendered and the next) and consumption.

If Qualcomm’s forecast comes true, the first mobile games and XR (augmented and mixed reality) products with Snapdragon GSR will be available by the end of the year. Some of the titles and studios mentioned by the company are: Call of Duty Warzone Mobile (Activision), Jade Dynasty: New Fantasy (Perfect World), Return to Empire (Tencent), Justice Mobile (NetEase), Naraka Mobile (NetEase) and Farming Simulator 23 Mobile (Giants Software). For now Qualcomm has not offered real-game analytics to see how Game Super Resolution works.