Mobile gamers stand to gain higher-resolution visuals and significantly higher frame rates without proportional increases in power draw, starting with Xiaomi’s latest foldable. The 18 Fold has begun shipping in mainland China equipped with a custom Xring O3 chipset that incorporates Arm’s Mali G2-Ultra NX, a GPU family that adds a dedicated AI gaming accelerator after five years of development.
Arm positions the G2-Ultra NX as both a conventional GPU upgrade and the first mainstream hardware platform for what it calls neural graphics. The company lists hardware-accelerated effects including AI upscaling, frame generation and neural denoising, techniques that resemble Nvidia’s DLSS family and let a device render fewer pixels while relying on AI to reconstruct detail.
Arm says the G2-Ultra NX delivers an 85-percent performance increase over the GPU Xiaomi used previously, and a 14 percent uplift versus Arm’s prior flagship in non-AI gaming workloads. The vendor further projects that using Neural Super Sampling, Neural Frame Rate Upscaling and Neural Denoising together can produce up to four times the framerate, though it warns that higher visual framerates do not automatically make gameplay feel proportionally faster because frame generation can add latency.
“The first titles will largely be super sampling,” Arm’s Chris Bergey, EVP of Edge AI, says, with frame gen arriving in early 2027 and denoising coming “soon after that.” Bergey also framed the rollout as broader than a single premium phone. “You will be able to buy it; you will be able to get it in phones next year, you will be able to get it in other types of larger screen devices, whether that be tablets or Chromebooks,” he says.
Power and thermal targets are central to the pitch. Arm highlights device budgets of no more than 2.5 watts overall, with 1.5 watts allocated to the GPU, which it says will enable sustained play—for example, a phone running 1080p at 60 frames per second for hours—and demonstrations include a Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max driving games at 3.2K resolution and 120 frames per second.
Real-world impact depends on developer adoption. Unreal and Unity engine integrations can lower the work required, but studios still need to add and tune the features for individual titles. Arm notes other vendors and console developers are already mixing upscaling and frame-generation approaches on hardware that combines Arm designs with third-party GPUs. The first consumer products with Mali G2-Ultra NX are shipping now in China, wider device availability is expected next year, and Arm says the fuller set of neural graphics features will roll out through 2027.
