Qualcomm launches Snapdragon Gaming Super Resolution™ to fully unlock mobile gaming performance and bring longer battery life

Snapdragon Elite Gaming has always been committed to creating an excellent gaming experience for every user. Snapdragon supports many end-game-level features, including a 144FPS gaming experience and ultra-smooth graphics with the highest visual quality supported by True 10-bit HDR, allowing players to enjoy a gaming experience with over 1 billion colors. Snapdragon brings many mobile-first features to players' favorite games, including hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing, support for the latest upgrades to Unreal Engine 5, Variable Resolution Rendering (VRS), Vulkan 1.3 and many other features.

Today, Qualcomm Technologies continues to lead the trend of mobile gaming technology, launching a new feature of Snapdragon Elite Gaming - Snapdragon Game Super Resolution™ (Snapdragon GSR), which fully unleashes gaming performance and brings longer battery life.

What is game super resolution?

There are currently several technologies that can upscale games from lower resolutions to native resolutions, which can achieve better performance while reducing power consumption. Bilinear interpolation is the most commonly used stretching algorithm in mobile games. It has the highest performance but will cause the output image to be blurry. The current time-domain stretching algorithm can improve image quality, but it requires more input information and will be very heavy on the mobile phone platform in terms of performance.

Figure 1: Comparison of native resolution (1080p) and image quality achieved by using Snapdragon gaming super-resolution and bilinear interpolation technologies to achieve a 2x improvement. Here, the resolution of the input image is half the length and width of the output image.

What is Snapdragon Gaming Super Resolution (Game Super Resolution)?

Snapdragon Game Over-Resolution is a single-channel space-aware over-resolution technology developed by Qualcomm’s internal Snapdragon Game Studio. It can save power consumption and achieve the best game image quality improvement while fully releasing performance.

The Snapdragon gaming super single-channel solution is available for the first time. It is the latest feature for mobile and XR games. It can be used to maximize the gaming performance and battery life of Snapdragon terminals. It is currently available to major partners. While compatible with most GPUs, it can also provide the best performance on the Snapdragon platform.

How does Snapdragon game super score improve the gaming experience?

Snapdragon Gaming Super Score brings many improvements to the gaming experience for smartphones and XR devices:

1. Improve resolution while maintaining graphic visual quality

2. Improve the frame rate to achieve a smoother gaming experience

3. Reduce power consumption and achieve longer battery life

4. Improve visual fidelity while maintaining frame rate

With Snapdragon Gaming Super Score, 1080p game image quality can be upgraded to sharper 4K. A game that was originally only 30FPS can now show an effect of 60+FPS, with smoother graphics. Since performance is closely related to power consumption, players can enjoy longer gaming sessions while taking advantage of the above features.

1080p native image  

Take advantage of Snapdragon gaming super scores and upgrade to 4K 

Figure 2: Snapdragon Game Super Score can upgrade 1080P game image quality to sharper 4K on mobile and XR terminals

Snapdragon Gaming Super Score allows players to prioritize higher resolutions, faster frame rates, or longer battery life based on their personal preferences when playing mobile games.

How does Snapdragon gaming overscore work?

Snapdragon Gaming Super Score is a space-based single-channel pixel doubling technology optimized for Snapdragon Adreno GPU. It specially customizes dynamic resolution enhancement technology based on value range for the Adreno GPU pipeline, which can achieve excellent graphics quality and reduce power consumption. Generally speaking, compared with other solutions for improving resolution on mobile devices, Snapdragon game super can achieve 2 times the performance improvement.

The figure below shows the performance comparison between Snapdragon Gaming Super Score and other leading resolution enhancement technologies for input targets of different resolutions:

Figure 3: Performance comparison between Snapdragon game super resolution and other mainstream resolution improvement technologies

As shown in the figure below, in addition to better performance, Snapdragon Game Super Score can also bring excellent visual quality and graphics processing capabilities that are close to the native rendering effect of the game.

Figure 4: Comparison of performance and visual effects at different resolution improvement rates between native resolution (1080p) and using Snapdragon game overclocking.

The demo was created using Unreal Engine 5, with the Ray Query shadow set to emit 2 rays per pixel.

How to improve the speed of Snapdragon game super score on Snapdragon hardware?

Snapdragon Gaming Ultra uses as few registers, texture sampling instructions and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) instructions as possible on Adreno hardware.

Other upscaling techniques use at least two channels on the input image, which increases the bandwidth used in the upscaling process. Snapdragon Gaming Super Score integrates resolution improvement and edge sharpening into one channel, reducing latency and memory bus usage, thereby reducing power consumption and increasing speed.

Snapdragon Gaming Ultra's single pass can be merged with other post-processing passes (such as tone mapping) to further improve performance.

In addition to using a single channel, Snapdragon Gaming Super uses fewer ALU instructions and texture sample sampling compared to competing products, achieving higher shader processor utilization, thereby reducing frame time and power consumption.

Snapdragon Game Super Score uses a convolution kernel with a size of 12 pixels to act on the brightness map of the input image to calculate the weight, and the brightness is approximated by the green (G) channel of the input image, because the human eye is most sensitive to green.

Therefore, when calculating each pixel, Snapdragon gaming super-resolution technology will perform single-channel texture sampling on 12 pixels in the input image and three-channel texture sampling on 1 pixel, resulting in a total of only 15 texture sampling instructions— —Adreno GPU can completely hide the latency of these texture samples, achieving 100% shader processor utilization.

The performance of the above results on relevant Snapdragon mobile platform terminals is summarized as follows:

Mobile gaming and XR products supporting Snapdragon gaming super-resolution technology are expected to be released later this year.

Leading Game Studio Using Snapdragon Gaming Super-Score Technology in Games