Mali GPUs Will Receive AI Upgrades for Sharp, Faster Gaming in 2026

In a unique start to his ruling against President Donald Trump’s administration on September 30, U.S. District Court Judge William Young included a scanned handwritten note sent to his office. The note read: “Trump has pardons and tanks – what do you have?” At the top of Young’s opinion in AAUP v. Rubio, which ruled that Trump’s effort to deport foreign-born student protesters was unconstitutional.

October 8, 2025

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Mobile gaming and graphics are set to receive a significant boost thanks to Arm’s latest Neural Super Sampling (NSS) technology, which was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2025. This AI-powered upscaling technology is designed to bring desktop-class visuals to mobile devices by combining lower-resolution renderings with advanced neural network processing. Baked into the next generation of Mali GPUs, Arm Neural Technology aims to revolutionize how Android flagships and gaming phones handle graphics, delivering sharper images and smoother frame rates while maintaining or improving battery life.

Arm’s Neural Super Sampling offers DLSS-style AI upscaling for Android phones, enabling smoother gameplay and improved graphics performance.

If you are not familiar with Neural Super Sampling (NSS), it works by rendering frames at a reduced resolution. Arm demonstrated the upscaling from 540p to 1080p using a trained neural network running on dedicated on-chip accelerators. The AI reconstructs images that look very close to native resolution but with much less power and processing demand. Early testing shows that the entire upscaling process can happen in just 4 milliseconds per frame, which is promising for maintaining high frame rates without draining battery life.

One of the key benefits of NSS is how it reduces artifacts common in older upscaling methods, such as smearing or ghosting. By leveraging the neural network’s ability to fill in details, Arm’s new NSS offers smoother and cleaner visuals, which ultimately creates a more immersive gaming experience on mobile devices. Apart from gaming, these neural accelerators can also improve other graphics-heavy applications, including real-time ray tracing denoising and AI-enhanced camera features.

Arm’s Neural Super Sampling works similarly to NVIDIA’s DLSS technology, as both use AI-powered neural networks to upscale lower-resolution frames to higher resolution, reducing GPU workload while maintaining high-quality visuals. The difference is that DLSS runs on NVIDIA’s Tensor Cores in desktop GPUs, whereas NSS uses dedicated neural accelerators built into Mali GPUs, which are optimized only for mobile devices. This will allow Android phones to enjoy DLSS-style performance and efficiency gains on the go.

Arm is also providing developers with an open Neural Graphics Development Kit well before the hardware hits the shelves. The toolkit includes an Unreal Engine plugin, Vulkan-based PC emulation, updated profiling tools, and Hugging Face integration. Early access to the toolkit will allow developers and app creators to experiment and optimize their software for the upcoming hardware, ensuring a smooth rollout when devices with Arm Neural Technology launch. Arm also plans to expand the technology with features like Neural Frame Rate Upscaling and Neural Super Sampling Denoising in 2026, which will push graphics performance even further.