Qualcomm has made its Adreno Neural Fusion (ANF) SDK available to Android game developers, aiming to enhance the mobile gaming experience. Developed for Snapdragon GPUs, the technology combines AI-powered Super Resolution and Frame Generation features.
DLSS Rival for Android Games is Coming
Thanks to Adreno Neural Fusion, games can be rendered at lower resolutions while AI is used to create higher-resolution images. The technology can also increase the on-screen frame rate by inserting a new frame between two actual frames. Initially, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and newer platforms are supported.
Qualcomm's Super Resolution solution upscales images rendered at half resolution to full resolution using temporal data. The system combines image data from multiple frames with depth information, motion vectors, and camera movements. This architecture is similar in principle to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR technologies.
Frame Generation, on the other hand, approximately doubles the number of displayed frames by inserting an intermediate frame between two real frames. However, it is stated that the generated frames do not increase the actual simulation speed of the game. Qualcomm also notes that using Frame Generation may introduce input latency equivalent to the time it takes to generate an additional frame.
Hardware Support Exclusive to Snapdragon GPUs
On supported Adreno GPUs, ANF leverages dedicated matrix cores for AI operations. Qualcomm also utilizes Adreno High Performance Memory (HPM) technology to prevent intermediate data from being constantly transferred to system memory. This aims to reduce memory bandwidth requirements and power consumption during gaming.
Even if compatible hardware lacks dedicated GPU matrix cores, the system can utilize NPU resources. The SDK supports Android ARM64 applications using Vulkan. Qualcomm also provides integration resources for Unreal Engine 5 and Unity 6.6 and later versions. While the Unity plugin currently focuses on the Super Resolution feature, the native SDK offers support for both Super Resolution and Frame Generation.
Adreno Neural Fusion is currently available to developers via Qualcomm's public GitHub repository. The company plans to extend support to more Snapdragon platforms in the future, but a compatibility roadmap has not yet been announced.
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