Snapdragon Elite Gaming offers everyone world-class gaming experiences. That’s because the latest generation Snapdragon chipsets are packed with so many desktop-level gaming features, such as gaming at 144 FPS, offering ultra-smooth graphics at the greatest visual quality, and genuine 10-bit HDR, allowing you to game in over a billion different colours.
Snapdragon enables your favourite games to take advantage of many first-to-market mobile gaming innovations, such as Real-time Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing, compatibility for the most recent Unreal Engine 5 upgrades, VRS, Vulkan 1.3, and many more.
Today, Qualcomm Technology, Inc. maintains its leadership in mobile gaming technology by introducing Snapdragon Game Super ResolutionTM (Snapdragon GSR), a new Snapdragon Elite Gaming feature capable of maximising mobile game performance and battery life.
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What is Super Resolution in Gaming?
Games may now upscale the resolution from a lesser resolution to a native resolution using a variety of methods. Better performance and power savings follow from this. The majority of popular upscaling methods rely on bilinear interpolation; while this can reduce power consumption, it can also reduce the clarity of graphics by blurring edges and details.
What is Snapdragon Game Super Resolution (GSR)?
In order to obtain the finest super scaling quality at the best performance and power savings, Qualcomm Snapdragon Studios developed Snapdragon GSR, a one-pass spatially aware super-resolution technology.
| Technique | Performance | Output Quality | Render passes | Input requirements | Temporally stable | Max scale (in each dimension) |
| Bilerp | Very Fast | Low | 1 | None | Yes | No limit |
| AMD FSR 1.0 (Open-Source) | Fast | Good | 2 | Buffer Tonemapped and anti-aliased | Yes | 2x |
| AMD FSR 2.0 (Open-Source) | Not suitable for mobile at this time | |||||
| Snapdragon GSR | Fastest | Good | 1 | Buffer Tonemapped and anti-aliased | Yes | 2x |
How does Snapdragon Game Super Resolution improve games?
The Snapdragon GSR offers various advantages for games on all mobile and XR devices:
- Increase resolutions while keeping graphical visual quality intact.
- Increase the frame rate for more fluid gameplay.
- Extend battery life by decreasing power usage.
- Improve graphic fidelity while keeping the framerate constant
With Snapdragon GSR, 1080p games may be sharpened to 4K resolution. Games that were at 30 frames per second can now be played at 60+ frames per second, making the graphics look even smoother.
And, because performance is proportional to power, you may obtain these capabilities while prolonging battery life and playtime time. With Snapdragon GSR, 1080p native image 4k upscaling is possible.
How does Snapdragon Game Super Resolution work?
Snapdragon GSR is a spatial upscaling approach that uses a single pass and is optimised for Snapdragon Adreno GPUs.
It employs range-aware dynamic scaling with Adreno GPU pipeline tweaks to give greater visual quality while saving electricity.
In general, Snapdragon GSR outperforms other mobile upscaling methods by a factor of two. Along with improved performance, Snapdragon GSR enables enhanced visual quality and graphics that are perceptually near to natively rendering the game, as illustrated in the figure below.
How does Snapdragon Game Super Resolution perform so quickly on Snapdragon hardware?
Other upscaling approaches make at least two passes over the input image, increasing the bandwidth consumed by the upscaling process.
Snapdragon GSR combines upscaling and edge sharpening into a single process, lowering latency and memory bus utilisation while enhancing power consumption and performance. To improve efficiency even further, the software’s single pass can be combined with various post-processing stages.
In addition to using a single pass, Snapdragon GSR uses fewer ALU instructions and texture samples than its competitors, resulting in substantially improved shader processor utilisation and lower frame times and battery consumption.
The Snapdragon GSR uses a 12-kernel window, with the luminance computation confined to the green (G) channel due to the human eye’s sensitivity to this colouring.
As a result, Snapdragon GSR samples use just one component for each pixel computation and three-component interpolation, resulting in only 15 texture instructions – Adreno GPUs can entirely mask the latency of these texture samples, delivering 100% shader processor utilisation.
| Device | ALUs | Half ALUs | Texture Instructions | Shader Processor Utilization |
| Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 | 14 | 167 | 15 | 100% |
| Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 | ||||
| Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 | ||||
| Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 |
Snapdragon Game Super Resolution is fully compatible with all Snapdragon GPUs and all game engines. Later this year, mobile games and XR items featuring Snapdragon GSR are scheduled to be released.
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