Hardwired
In Hardwired, AC Senior Editor Harish Jonnalagadda delves into all things hardware, including phones, audio products, storage servers, and networking gear.
Android gaming has come a long way in the last five years, but power constraints remain the biggest issue. Unlike a desktop PC, phones have significant thermal restraints and a power budget that doesn’t extend beyond 5W. That’s why we don’t see many games with ray-traced shadows and realistic lighting effects, but that could be changing thanks to Arm’s Neural Technology.
Arm introduced the tech last year, and the brand is now readying Neural Dawn, a game made in collaboration with Sumo Digital that highlights the best that the AI-assisted neural rendering suite has to offer on mobile. The game itself is launching later in Q4 2026, and Arm just rolled out a trailer. Ahead of its debut, I talked to Peter Hodges, Director of Developer Ecosystem Strategy at Arm, and Lukáš Medek, Art Director at Sumo Digital and Game Director of Neural Dawn, to get a better sense of what the tech has to offer, and why this is a big deal for mobile gaming.
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Let’s start with the game itself: Neural Dawn will have four levels and around 120 minutes of gameplay, and it follows a “research scientist within a cave network who is guided by light to uncover the truth behind a collapsing civilization, the head scientist’s hidden plan, and their own connection to it.” Basically, the game sees the mobile debut of Unreal Engine 5.5’s MegaLights dynamic lighting technique, and this allows game makers to add hundreds of dynamic lights into a scene. Medek talked about how the tech enabled Sumo Digital to deliver dynamic lighting instead of having to “bake” lighting into textures or use “fake shadows.”
The issue with the lighting system is that you get a lot of noise, and Hodges says this is where Arm’s Neural Denoising makes a difference. The tech ensures you still get a lot of detail, with minimal noise that isn’t noticeable in most scenes.
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It also allowed the studio to iterate faster, and make lighting an “active part of the storytelling process,” and it is impressive that the tech is making its way to mobile. In addition to dynamic lighting, Neural Dawn gets Arm’s Neural Super Sampling tech, which is similar to what NVIDIA does with DLSS and AMD with FSR. Essentially, upcoming Mali GPUs will have dedicated neural accelerators that enable higher-quality visuals while using the same amount of power. Hodges talked about how the tech will reduce overall rendering costs to deliver games with much better visual fidelity on phones.
With NSS, visuals are rendered at a lower resolution, and the tech leverages AI to essentially upscale textures. Arm also has frame upscaling that enables smoother motion, and it’s great to see these features make their way to mobile devices. Arm says the AI-assisted suite will be limited to phones powered by the upcoming Mali GPUs — Hodges didn’t go into detail about the actual products — as it needs the dedicated neural accelerators.
Ultimately, Neural Dawn is a great showcase for how Arm’s neural rendering tech can make a difference on mobile devices. The brand is taking all of its learnings from the exercise and creating a playbook that studios can utilize to understand how to incorporate neural graphics into their own games, and the Neural Graphics Development Kit — which combines all of these technologies — is available in early access. The big question is whether other game studios will bite, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see at least a few titles that leverage these features in the coming years.
That said, the fact that these features are only available on Mali GPUs is a limitation, as it rules out Pixels (the Pixel 10 Pro XL uses the PowerVR DXT-48-1536) and Samsung’s Galaxy S devices — the S26 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm’s Adreno 840, and the S26/S26+ have Samsung’s homegrown Xclipse 960. That leaves phones powered by MediaTek hardware, which includes select OPPO, Vivo, and Xiaomi devices. There’s a possibility that the neural tech won’t see much mainstream use in North America — MediaTek just doesn’t have enough of a presence in the region — but we should have more details around that situation when Arm details new hardware.