How strong is the mobile super-scoring technology?MediaTek Dimensity 9000 brings the top experience of mobile phone energy efficiency

“With the advancement of technology, the gaming experience on PC and mobile phones has been greatly improved in recent years. Technologies such as hardware thread scheduler (Thread Director), deep learning super sampling (DLSS) and other technologies are emerging one after another. Advanced scheduling and the cooperation of various units have brought a subversive gaming experience.In the mobile game industry, with the deployment of these technologies in the mobile phone industry, the screen and experience of mobile games will be upgraded in a straight line.

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With the advancement of technology, the gaming experience on PC and mobile phones has been greatly improved in recent years. Technologies such as hardware thread scheduler (Thread Director), deep learning super sampling (DLSS) and other technologies are emerging one after another. Advanced scheduling and the cooperation of various units have brought a subversive gaming experience.In the mobile game industry, with the deployment of these technologies in the mobile phone industry, the screen and experience of mobile games will be upgraded in a straight line.

Looking back at the past two years, the development of smartphone chips has been very rapid, and the 4nm process and armv9 architecture have become new technology nodes. Taking MediaTek’s latest flagship Dimensity 9000 chip as an example, it not only adopts a high-performance three-cluster CPU architecture, but also upgrades the GPU to Mali-G710 ten-core, greatly improving graphics performance and energy efficiency.

With the increasing demand for performance in mobile games, especially with the trend of thin and light mobile phones, hand warmers in winter and hot hands in summer have been complained for more than a year, and problems such as heat and power consumption have begun to become shackles that affect player experience. The chip needs to be full of firepower and calm output. MediaTek is using a new way to achieve the optimal solution for performance and energy efficiency.

In order to solve the problems of heat and battery life caused by the high power consumption of the chip, and break the shackles of GPU performance, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 supports the mobile game super-score technology (Game AI-SR). This technology can be regarded as a “mobile version” of technologies such as NVIDIA DLSS. The principle is to first render a lower-resolution picture through the GPU, and then “brain-fill” the picture close to the original resolution through the APU and algorithm, and restore the picture. screen details.

The difference is that the goal of the super-resolution technology on the PC is to achieve a higher game frame rate; while the main task of the super-resolution technology on the mobile terminal is to reduce the power consumption of the chip under the premise of ensuring near-native image quality. With the super-score technology of “first subtraction and then addition”, even if players choose high-definition mode to play games, the game experience will not be affected by heat and battery life.

Some people will ask, how is this seemingly simple process realized inside the intricate chip?

From the internal perspective of the chip, MediaTek’s mobile game super-resolution technology is a heterogeneous solution combining GPU and APU, which can achieve a balance between the overall power consumption and image quality of the platform. The GPU and APU have the effect of “combining dual U with no tiring work”, thereby effectively reducing the overall power consumption of the chip.

According to industry insiders, the use of machine learning for super-scoring will gradually become mainstream because it has greater advantages than traditional techniques. Machine learning-based neural network architectures can better learn features between low- and high-resolution images, and repair distortions and reconstruct resolutions to higher levels. AI algorithms running in dedicated cores can strike a balance between power consumption and quality. It can be used in games and videos to improve user experience.

MediaTek’s mobile game super-resolution technology can achieve 1.5x resolution scaling. To give a common example, after the super-score is turned on, the smartphone uses the GPU in the chip to render a 720P picture, and then hand it over to the APU to perform a series of operations such as zooming, sharpening, anti-aliasing and so on based on the deep neural network and machine learning technology. , restore it to the effect close to 1080P picture, so as to enhance the image output quality. Through the GPU and APU collaborative graphics processing, the picture quality close to the original picture can be obtained, and the power consumption can be effectively reduced.

With the help of APU’s “brain supplement”, the mobile game super-scoring technology can provide visual effects close to the original painting, greatly reducing GPU rendering power consumption

Facing the vast mobile game ecosystem in the future, MediaTek uses its own powerful computing resources to train and improve AI models, provide AI models that have completed super-score optimization to game developers, or provide game developers with tools for self-developed super-scores to assist them in completing In-game super-score optimization. Through advanced AI development tools, MediaTek organically connects chips, terminals, and game developers, and works with partners to bring players a mobile gaming experience with high image quality, fluency, and energy efficiency.

Through advanced AI development tools, MediaTek empowers game developers to adapt to mobile super-score technology, bringing better energy efficiency and image quality performance

At present, relying on AI technology to do work to support GPU to achieve super-score in mobile games has high requirements for chip design. It is better to use an independent APU in the chip, rather than borrowing other computing units for AI task processing, because an independent APU like the Dimensity 9000 can meet the energy-efficient AI calculation, and the traditional CPU and GPU are called for AI calculation. The actual efficiency is very low, and it is not worth the gain if it is used for game overscore.

The independent APU can be “dedicated to the core”, and the energy efficiency of AI computing has obvious advantages compared with CPU and GPU

MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000 integrates APU590 and has six cores, of which four “performance cores” bring powerful AI computing power to mobile game super-scoring technology. Compared with the previous generation APU, the performance and energy efficiency of the APU590 have been greatly improved by 400%, and the APU590 continues to lead the industry in the ETH BurnOut energy efficiency test.

Previously, Counterpoint, a world-renowned research organization, pointed out in the “White Paper on the Development Trend of 5G Flagship Smartphone Chips” that the proportion of SoC-driven smartphones with dedicated artificial intelligence elements in 2020 is expected to be about 35%, and this penetration rate is expected to reach 2023. annual increase to more than 75%.

Therefore, most SoC design companies have adopted independent AI cores, such as MediaTek’s APU and Apple’s NPU, and the Tensor Core AI processing unit integrated into NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPU.

It is expected that the penetration rate of SoC equipped with APU will increase to more than 75% in 2023, which is conducive to the development of mobile AI super-score technology

At present, the super-resolution technology on the PC side has developed to the second stage, that is, the visual effects of the original painting are infinitely approached or even surpassed, and the frame rate has reached a new level. At present, the super-resolution technology of mobile games is just in its infancy. However, from the perspective of computing development, mobile chips can be said to stand on the shoulders of giants. The AI ​​computing unit developed by the PC platform over a long period of time has now become the standard configuration of MediaTek’s Dimensity series mobile platforms.

It is no exaggeration to say that mobile game super-score will become the most potential mobile game technology in the next five years. Facing the global high-speed compound growth of mobile game market and the ecological trend of the metaverse, its iteration speed in the future is expected to even exceed that of “Big Brother”. “PC platform.

Recently, a big V broke the news that the new vivo X80 is equipped with Dimensity 9000, which will support the game super-scoring technology. It seems that this technology with super-excellent experience is not far away from us. I believe that the majority of mobile game players are very much looking forward to the implementation of this technology.

At present, MediaTek is building a comprehensive mobile game technology matrix, leading the technological transition of mobile games, and bringing players a “3A game”-like visual, auditory and tactile experience. MediaTek’s HyperEngine game engine includes an image quality engine, an intelligent scheduling engine, a network engine and a control engine, and supports advanced technologies such as mobile game hyper-scoring technology and mobile ray tracing. The focus of continuous upgrading of game technology.

MediaTek has been committed to the research in the field of graphics, promoting the progress of related technologies, constantly upgrading the MediaTek HyperEngine game engine, bringing more powerful game rendering effects to the mobile terminal, and perfectly presenting the level of the terminal game on the mobile terminal. Developers and terminal manufacturers provide powerful graphics processing capabilities and solutions to bring more realistic game images to gamers and lead the development of mobile graphics.