Processor designer Arm has created a new shader-based upscaler for mobile devices with tiny GPUs but high-resolution screens. What makes this one different to the likes of Qualcomm's Game Super Resolution and Nvidia's DLSS Super Resolution is that it's not only open-source itself but it's also been developed from the work of another open-source project: AMD's FSR 2.2 upscaler.
For better or worse, upscaling has become an expected feature in today's graphics-heavy games. Lowering the rendering resolution significantly helps to improve performance, because there are fewer pixels to process, but at the cost of a loss in visual fidelity. Upscalers are designed to mitigate this by having most of the frame rendering done at a low resolution, then scaling it back up to the monitor's resolution, before finishing off the final touches and presenting the frame.
