If you love playing mobile games, you will be interested in Qualcomm's new spatial upscaling tool called Snapdragon Game Super Resolution or GSR. The company claims that this tool will maximize mobile game performance and battery life.
GSR is one of many upscaling techniques that exist for mobile games, allowing upscaling from a lower resolution to a higher, native resolution to improve performance without draining battery life. GSR takes a different and more powerful approach to bump up the resolution.
Snapdragon GSR will upscale 1080p games to 4K
According to Qualcomm, GSR is a single pass spatial aware super resolution technique that achives the optimal scaling quality while maximizing performance and power savings. The tool resolves edge sharpening and upscaling in one pass which reduces consumption. It can even be combined with other post-processing effects like tone-mapping to increase the performance even further.
Simply put, this means that GSR enables 1080p games to become sharper, 4K games. Games only at 30 FPS can be played at 60+ FPS, making the graphics look even smoother. None of this performance enhancement comes at the cost of battery life, which is certainly the cherry on top.
Qualcomm has provided a graph showing the Snapdragon GSR performance relative to other upscaling techniques at various resolution targets. However, the competitors are only identified with a “competitor upscaling” label, so it's not possible to see precisely which other techniques GSR is beating.
It goes without saying that GSR works best with Qualcomm Snapdragon Adreno GPUs since the tool has specific optimizations for the Adreno GPU pipeline. However, Qualcomm does say that GSR will work with most other mobile GPUs. The company also confirmed that more mobile games and extended reality products with GSR support will arrive later this year.
Jade Dynasty: New Fantasy is the only GSR-supported game that's available for download right now and we tried it on the Galaxy S23 Ultra. While we didn't see any difference in the frame rate in this particular game, it does look sharper and better, even when the game was still downloading character textures. Other titles that support GSR and will be rolling out widely soon include Call of Duty Warzone Mobile, Return to Empire, Justice Mobile, Naraka Mobile and Farming Simulator 23 Mobile
