Qualcomm Says that its New Tech Improves Mobile Gaming Visuals

The introduction of AAA development tools for use with mobile gaming has seen a rise in adoption among OEMS and developers, with features such as Ray Tracing making their way to smaller screens. With that being said, Qualcomm recently announced a new addition to its Snapdragon Elite Feature in the form of “Snapdragon Game Super Resolution” (GSR), which the company says brings improved visuals to mobile gaming titles.

In technical terms, GSR is a single pass spatial upscaling technique developed to work with Snapdragon Adreno graphics processing units (GPUs), and uses range-aware dynamic scaling with customizations for the Adreno GPU pipeline. Simply put, it’s a method that lets devices render titles with improved visuals and smoothness during gameplay.

When in action, GSR will be able to increase the overall resolution of a video game in addition to frame rate, improved power consumption, as well as visual fidelity. Qualcomm claims that this will allow games that run in a 1080p resolution to render at a higher 4K resolution. The same goes for titles that run on 30 FPS, which will be able to run at a higher 60+ FPS frame rate. This makes it ideal for mobile devices that pack displays with 144 Hz refresh rates, for example.

Video game upscaling isn’t a new trend, however. The game development industry has seen varying techniques which allow for upscaling to be made possible, such those based on bilinear interpolation – however, these often come at the cost of overall visual fidelity. While upscaling has mostly been used for console and PC titles, Qualcomm’s approach means that upscaling for mobile games is now made all the more accessible for developers.

Additionally, several games have made use of Snapdragon GSR, including Call of Duty Warzone Mobile, Jade Dynasty: New Fantasy, Return to Empire, Farming Simulator 23 Mobile, Justice Mobile, and Naraka Mobile, to name some. Qualcomm says that it has been working with devs to bring GSR to more screens worldwide.

In terms of availability, Qualcomm states that mobile Games and XR products with Snapdragon GSR support are expected to launch later this year.

Source: Qualcomm