GPU design firm Imagination Technologies has unveiled Neural Super Resolution (NSR), a new AI-powered upscaling technology.
NSR is a technology that renders games at a resolution lower than the actual display resolution and then uses AI to restore the image to a higher resolution. Its goal is to achieve image quality close to native rendering while reducing GPU load compared to drawing directly at high resolutions, serving a similar role to NVIDIA's DLSS or Intel's XeSS.
Along with this announcement, Imagination also revealed test results of running NSR on its next-generation E-Series GPU. According to the company, converting a 540p image to 1080p on a single-core E-Series GPU operating at 1 GHz takes as little as 2.3 ms.
By drawing the screen at a lower resolution first, it reduces not only the workload the GPU must process but also the data moving back and forth to memory. Imagination explained that this enables securing high frame rates while cutting memory bandwidth usage by up to half.
Of course, it is not simply a matter of enlarging a lower-resolution image. NSR utilizes information from previously rendered frames alongside the current frame to restore fine details lost at lower resolutions. The AI operations required for this are also designed to be processed inside the E-Series GPU itself, allowing the technology to be leveraged without adding a separate dedicated AI accelerator.
Support for game developers to integrate NSR into actual games will also follow. Imagination plans to add NSR to its development toolkit, the PowerVR SDK, and support its use in Unreal Engine and Godot Engine in the future. W4 Games, which supports the commercialization of Godot Engine, also participated in the announcement, noting that hardware-optimized upscaling technology can help enhance graphics quality while maintaining performance.
The E-Series, which serves as the foundation for NSR, is a next-generation GPU design under development by Imagination. It aims for broad application ranging from low-power devices such as smartphones to systems requiring higher performance, and is designed so that a single GPU handles graphics processing as well as AI compute.
In this announcement, the gaming performance of the E-Series itself was also revealed. According to Imagination's internal measurements using actual games, it recorded up to 54% higher performance compared to equivalent previous-generation D-Series products, while performance at the same power consumption improved by up to 39%. In a configuration utilizing four GPU cores, it stated that it ran certain PC AAA games at over 60 frames per second. However, specific test conditions such as game titles, resolution, and graphics settings were not disclosed.
Multiple semiconductor companies have currently signed licensing agreements for the E-Series. Imagination expects that the first chips featuring the E-Series will complete design and enter the physical production stage within this year.
