Arm Opens Up ASR Scaling Technology to Developers for Mobile Devices

Arm has announced the availability of its ASR upscaler for game developers. The technology, unveiled at GDC 2025, is intended to fill a gap in the Android ecosystem where there have been no open source upscaling solutions, unlike Apple with its MetalFX technology. Arm also promised to release ready-made plugins for integrating ASR into Unity and Unreal Engine games by the end of the year.

Image Source: Arm

When it comes to mobile upscaling, there are often tradeoffs in image quality for performance or battery life. For example, Qualcomm GSR, which uses spatial upscaling, was limited by hardware capabilities and game support, which limited its impact on the Android market. ASR, on the other hand, being an open solution, allows developers to customize it to their needs.

In a demo project, Mori Arm showed ASR running in Unreal Engine 5, where the technology provided up to a 30% FPS boost without any loss of image quality. This confirms the company’s claims that ASR can combine high performance with excellent visuals. The situation is also good because the technology will be supported by most Arm-based devices, regardless of the manufacturer.

Among other things, integrating ASR into Unity and Unreal Engine games promises to be easy thanks to ready-made plugins that Arm plans to release this year. ASR is expected to appear in popular games such as Genshin Impact (Unity), Wuthering Waves (Unreal Engine), and Fortnite (Unreal Engine). However, thanks to its open source nature, ASR can be integrated into other game engines, although this will require additional effort from developers.

The technology supports a wide range of mobile processors, including Qualcomm Snapdragon, MediaTek Dimensity, Google Tensor, Samsung Exynos, and Apple A-series/M-series. Arm claims that ASR will be as scalable as FSR 2 and will be able to run on almost all modern Arm-based devices.

As for the hardware requirements, they are noted to depend on the developers and Arm itself, but are likely to be minimal. This makes the technology accessible to a wide range of devices, and in the near future, ASR may become a key tool for improving the performance and energy efficiency of mobile games, especially given the growing popularity of games on Android and other platforms.