GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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China is getting first crack at a British technology that might change how mobile games are made and played. Today, the Xiaomi 18 Fold launches in mainland China with an Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX graphics processor inside its custom Xring O3 chip. What’s so special about that? After five years of development, Arm now has an AI gaming graphics accelerator inside its GPU.
By following Nvidia’s playbook, Arm-powered phones are about to have PC-like technologies to make games run faster, at higher resolution, with advanced lighting techniques, all without using more power than they do today. The jagged edges you see in the mobile versions of popular games might begin to go away.
And these advancements won’t just be locked to Chinese phones. The chips, devices, and games are already inbound.
“You will be able to buy it; you will be able to get it in phones next year, you will be able to get it in other types of larger screen devices, whether that be tablets or Chromebooks,” Arm’s Chris Bergey, EVP of Edge AI, tells The Verge in an interview.
While he can’t say which other devices will contain the Mali G2-Ultra NX, he hints that some of Google’s upcoming Googlebooks might use this graphics tech as well.
“We think it’s going to be huge,” Bergey tells me.
DLSS for Android
There are two ways to look at Arm’s new Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX. One is that it’s stronger than prior mobile GPUs, period, with an alleged 85-percent performance increase over the GPU that Xiaomi was using previously, and a 14 percent increase over Arm’s previous flagship in “non-AI gaming.”
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