First Xiaomi, then the world: why Arm might give phone gaming a huge graphics boost

China is getting first crack at a British technology that might change how mobile games are made and played. Today, the Xiaomi 18 Fold launches in mainland China with an Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX graphics processor inside its custom Xring O3 chip. After five years of development, Arm now has an AI gaming graphics accelerator inside its GPU. One is that it’s stronger than prior mobile GPUs, period, with an alleged 85-percent performance increase over the GPU that Xiaomi was using previously, and a 14 percent increase over Arm’s previous flagship in “non-AI gaming.” But the other, more important way is that it enables a suite of hardware-accelerated graphical techniques that sound very similar to Nvidia’s DLSS, including AI upscaling (where it imagines a higher-resolution image), frame generation (where it generates new “fake” frames between existing ones), and even ray reconstruction like Nvidia’s DLSS 4.5.