Desktop-Quality Ray-Traced Gaming and Intelligent AI Performance on Mobile with New Arm Mali G1-Ultra GPU

Today’s mobile devices have evolved into the primary compute platform for immersive gaming and highly intelligent real-time user experiences. However, as consumer expectations continue to grow, there are ever-increasing demands on the hardware to deliver high-end visuals, advanced AI, and premium performance, all while not exceeding mobile power limits.

A staggering 83 percent of the gamer population now play on mobile, contributing to 390 billion total hours, according to the latest Newzoo report. Arm is at the center of these mobile gaming experiences, with over 12 billion Arm GPUs shipped to date. Our ongoing collaboration with the entire ecosystem – from device OEMs to game engines and app developers – means we deliver the performance and tools needed for next-generation gaming experiences.

We have listened to our partners, and the next stage of this ongoing evolution is our new Arm Mali G1-Ultra GPU. This represents the pinnacle of mobile GPU performance and efficiency and is a core component of the new Arm Lumex compute subsystem (CSS) platform for flagship smartphones and large screen compute.

Introducing the Arm Mali G1-Ultra: Redefining Gaming and AI

Built for the new era of mobile gaming and AI, the Mali G1-Ultra delivers immersive high-end gaming experiences on mobile through:

• The next-generation Arm Ray Tracing Unit (RTUv2);
• Accelerated on-device AI;
• A re-architected graphics pipeline; and
• Enhanced architectural efficiency in a single, purpose-driven design.

Compared to the previous generation Arm Immortalis-G925 GPU, the Mali G1-Ultra delivers up to 2x increase in ray tracing performance, as well as 20 percent better performance across leading graphics benchmarks. For AI, the GPU speeds up inference across AI and machine learning (ML) networks by 20 percent compared to the Immortalis-G925, through new FP16 matrix compute paths. Finally, Mali G1-Ultra brings improvements across memory, scheduling, and developer tooling, enabling the Arm partner ecosystem to scale visuals and intelligence, without compromising power or efficiency.

Alongside the Mali G1-Ultra, which targets flagship smartphones, Arm is introducing Arm Mali G1-Premium and Mali G1-Pro GPUs that are designed to deliver scalable performance and efficiency across different mobile segments and tiers. With options spanning 1 to 24 shader cores, the flexible Mali G1 GPU family enables system-on-chip (SoC) designers to tailor GPU configurations for their chosen market and specific needs.

Desktop-Class Mobile Gaming Powered by Next-Gen Ray Tracing

Today’s most popular gaming apps are pushing the limits of mobile hardware, demanding advanced rendering, smoother frame rates and uncompromised efficiency. For these apps, Mali G1-Ultra provides across-the-board performance improvements including:

• 25 percent performance uplift in Arena Breakout;
• 19 percent performance uplift for Honkai Star Rail;
• 17 percent performance uplift in Genshin Impact;
• 11 percent performance uplift for Fortnite; and
• 26 percent performance uplift for Arm’s in-house Mori game demo.

These real-world app performance improvements are alongside the 2x uplift in ray tracing performance and 40 percent higher frame rates in hardware ray traced games that are made possible by the RTUv2 in the Mali G1-Ultra. This new ray tracing unit enables desktop-class lighting, reflections, and shadows – all tailored for real-time performance on mobile.

RTUv2 is smarter by design compared to the previous generation RTUv1, moving to a single ray model, with significantly enhanced support for incoherent rays, and becoming a fully separate hardware unit. These design changes provide large power efficiency and performance benefits. For example, the RTUv2’s modular architecture and independent power domains allow it to power down when the device is idle, which helps conserve energy for other tasks.

The balance of performance and efficiency through the RTUv2 makes the Mali G1-Ultra ideal for sustained gaming sessions on flagship smartphones.

Turbocharged Real-Time Intelligence at the Edge

AI is reshaping how mobile devices think, see, and respond – and GPUs are a big part of this ongoing evolution. Mali G1-Ultra introduces a new matrix multiply unit (MMUL) FP16 instruction that accelerates key on-device AI workloads, such as semantic segmentation, denoising, depth estimation, object detection, speech recognition, and image enhancement, with improvements of up to 104 percent compared with the previous generation Immortalis-G925.

With expanded L2 cache and optimized interconnects, the Mali G1-Ultra is built to run AI and graphics workloads in parallel, minimizing memory bottlenecks and keeping real-time experiences responsive and smooth. Whether it is improving photo quality or enabling smarter interactions across applications, the Mali G1-Ultra brings responsive real-time intelligence directly to the edge.

New Architectural Features for Scalable Performance

Behind every performance and efficiency gain is the latest architectural advances across all the new Mali G1 GPUs. Mali G1-Ultra introduces several core-level improvements to the Arm 5th Gen GPU Architecture that are designed to scale with increasing content complexity, and without over-extending power budgets.

Key updates include:

• Dual-stack shader cores, which double internal bandwidth and reduce congestion; and,
• An increase in Fast Access Uniform registers to minimize memory fetches during shader execution.

Together, these changes directly improve the responsiveness of effects like real-time lighting and physics-based rendering that can be compute-intensive workloads.

Mali G1-Ultra also introduces Arm Image Region Dependencies (IRD), a smarter scheduling feature that enables the GPU to handle different parts of the screen at the same time. This helps to boost performance and cut idle time in complex scenes.

Designed with Developers in Mind

To help developer teams optimize performance at a granular level, the Mali G1 GPUs offer enhanced observability through tile-based hardware counters. These provide per-frame region insights into GPU activity, allowing developers to identify hotspots and balance workloads more effectively than ever.

The counters are accessible via Vulkan extensions, with RenderDoc support coming in future Android releases. This makes it easier for game engines, game studios, and device OEMs to extract maximum performance from the architecture, while maintaining visual quality and battery efficiency.

The new Mali G1 GPUs also support Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (Arm ASR), our temporal upscaling technology that improves image quality while reducing GPU workloads. Available through Unreal Engine 5 and already integrated into the Fortnite mobile game, Arm ASR enables developers to maintain high frame rates without compromising visual fidelity. This helps unlock smoother gameplay and sharper detail across a broad range of mobile devices.

Unleashing Advanced Gaming and AI Experiences

Mali G1-Ultra redefines what mobile GPUs can do and enable. With breakthroughs in ray tracing, AI acceleration, and architectural efficiency, it lays the foundation for a new class of smartphone experiences, where users can enjoy more immersive, realistic gaming experiences for longer, and faster interactions through advanced built-in intelligence.

As mobile gaming reaches new levels of visual fidelity and AI becomes a standard part of everyday experiences, Mali G1-Ultra gives our ecosystem the performance, headroom, and tools they need to deliver rich, responsive, power-efficient performance across mobile devices.