Wired
In WiredAC Editor-in-Chief Harish Jonnalagadda covers everything including phones, audio products, storage servers and network devices.
Android gaming has come a long way in the past five years, but power limitations remain the biggest challenge. Unlike a desktop computer, phones have significant thermal limitations and a power budget of no more than 5W. That’s why we don’t see many games with ray-traced shadows and realistic lighting effects, but that could change thanks to Arm’s Neural Technology.
Arm introduced the technology last year, and the brand is now developing Neural Dawn, a game developed in collaboration with Sumo Digital, which highlights the best of what the AI-powered neural rendering suite has to offer on mobile devices. The game itself will launch in Q4 2026, and Arm has just released a trailer. Ahead of the debut, I spoke with Peter Hodges, Director of Developer Ecosystem Strategy at Arm, and Lukáš Medek, Art Director at Sumo Digital and Game Director at Neural Dawn, to better understand what the technology has to offer and why it’s a big deal for mobile gaming.
Let’s start with the game itself: Neural Dawn will have four levels and roughly 120 minutes of gameplay, and it follows “a research scientist inside a light-controlled cave network to uncover the truth behind a crumbling civilization, the master scientist’s secret plan, and his own connection to it.” Basically, the game sees the mobile debut of Unreal Engine 5.5’s MegaLights dynamic lighting technique, which allows game makers to add hundreds of dynamic lights to a scene. Medek told Sumo Digital about how the technology provides dynamic lighting instead of “baking” lighting into textures or using “fake shadows.”
The problem with the lighting system is that you get a lot of noise, and Hodges says Arm’s Neural Denoising makes a difference. The technology ensures that you still get plenty of detail with minimal noise that’s unnoticeable 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 the transfer of the technology to mobile is impressive. Along with dynamic lighting, Neural Dawn gets Arm’s Neural Super Sampling technology, similar to what NVIDIA has done with AMD with DLSS and FSR. In fact, upcoming Mali GPUs will have dedicated neural accelerators that provide higher quality visuals while using the same amount of power. Hodges talked about how the technology will reduce overall rendering costs to deliver games with better visual fidelity on phones.
With NSS, visuals are rendered at a lower resolution, and the technology uses artificial intelligence primarily for high-end textures. Arm is also increasing the bezel size to allow for smoother movement, and it’s great to see these features making their way to mobile devices. Arm says the AI-powered package will be limited to phones equipped with upcoming Mali GPUs — Hodges did not elaborate on the actual products — because it needs special neural accelerators.
Finally, Neural Dawn is a great demonstration of how Arm’s neural rendering technology can make a difference in mobile devices. Brand takes all his learnings from training and create a playbook that studios can use to understand how to incorporate neural graphics into their games, and the Neural Graphics Development Kit that integrates all these technologies 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 using these features in the coming years.
However, the fact that these features are only available on Mali GPUs is a limitation, as it excludes the Pixel (the Pixel 10 Pro XL uses the PowerVR DXT-48-1536) and Samsung’s Galaxy S — the S26 Ultra is equipped with Qualcomm’s Adreno 840, and the S26/S29+ departs from the Samsung Xcslip. phones powered by MediaTek hardware, which includes select OPPO, Vivo and Xiaomi devices. It’s likely that the Neural technology won’t see widespread use in North America – MediaTek doesn’t have much of a presence in the region – but we should have more details on that when Arm details the new hardware.
