Arm, the British chip designer, has unveiled a new mobile graphics processor, the Mali G2-Ultra NX, which debuts today inside the Xiaomi 18 Fold in China. The chip brings AI-driven graphical techniques similar to Nvidia's DLSS to smartphones for the first time, promising sharper, smoother games without a corresponding increase in power consumption. Arm executives say the technology will not remain exclusive to Chinese devices, with other phones, tablets and even Chromebooks expected to adopt it from next year.

The new GPU offers an 85% performance boost over Xiaomi's previous chip and a 14% gain over Arm's prior flagship in conventional gaming, but its bigger advance lies in "neural graphics" features including AI upscaling, frame generation and ray reconstruction, which combined could quadruple framerates. These features will roll out gradually, with super sampling arriving first, frame generation in early 2027 and denoising soon after. Arm's Chris Bergey said the efficiency gains could let phones sustain 1080p gaming at 60 frames per second for three hours, compared with roughly 30 minutes previously, while cautioning that perceived speed gains may be more modest due to added latency from frame generation.