The UK-based semiconductor and software design company Arm has revealed the game Neural Dawn, which takes advantage of Arm’s neural graphics technology to allow the use of Unreal Engine MegaLights on mobile devices. Until now, the ray-tracing capabilities of MegaLights were not supported on mobile.
Neural Dawn has been developed with the UK studio Sumo Digital, and it showcases the power of the Arm Mali GPU, which will be available later this year. The chip uses neural technology, which Arm says will deliver “desktop-class” visuals while maintaining battery life.
“Our collaboration with Arm proves that neural technology can make a significant difference to what’s possible in mobile gaming,” said Gary Dunn, Co-CEO and COO of Sumo Digital, in a statement.
“By using Arm Neural Technologies in Neural Dawn, Sumo Digital could bank a key power saving, enabling us to increase game session length and deliver a fundamental step-change in the experience we can deliver to players by switching on both MegaLights and ray-tracing; features that remain rare in console gaming, let alone on mobile. This is a huge cultural shift in how game studios will build games, no longer held back by traditional mobile constraints.”
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Peter Hodges, director of Developer Ecosystem Strategy at Arm, explained that the Mali chip incorporates neural networks, a form of machine learning (ML), alongside the GPU. “The neural technology that we’re advancing will take the whole of that network and will allow it to work in close conjunction with the GPU,” he says.
“So this is a very short latency interaction, a chop and change from graphics to ML and back again in short order. And that’s part of the innovation that we’re offering here, in that we’re not doing it bit by bit, instruction by instruction, but rather, here’s the work, keep it on chip, give me the result.”
Neural Dawn showcases two key technologies: Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD) and Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU).
Hodges explains that NSSD is what enables ray tracing to be achieved on mobile. “It’s expensive to cast rays, and the best mitigation to the cost of casting rays, of course, is to cast less rays. Now, if you cast less rays, well, you get incomplete information in your scene.” This results in “noise” on the image, something that NSSD corrects.
“The denoising approach that we take is imagery construction,” says Hodges. “This isn’t a generative model, this is about understanding the play of colours and shapes in a scene, and reconstructing from partial information, not imagining. If you don’t look like the ground truth, then that’s not a feature, that’s a bug.”
He adds that the tech is nothing like Nvidia’s controversial image-enhancing DLSS 5 technology, and notes that the models for it have been published. “We not only encourage people to inspect them, they can actually retrain the models against their own content,” he says.
“All of this is faithfully done, and we believe that it’s part of a general move to ensure that everyone can participate and understand in plain terms exactly what these models do and don’t do, and make reasoned choices about whether it fits for them.”
The other key technology used in Neural Dawn, NFRU, improves frame rate by taking a pair of consecutive frames and generating an intermediate one, allowing 30 fps content to be upscaled to 60 fps.
Lukáš Medek, an art director at Sumo Digital, tells GamesIndustry.biz that Neural Dawn was created by a team of 17 people over the course of 18 months. The game is around two hours in length, and sees a research scientist exploring a cave network, guided by light.
Thanks to the Arm tech, Medek says, “we realised that we basically can approach the development of the mobile game as if it were a console or PC game, regarding the number of assets, the size and number of textures, the number of materials and their functions, and also that we could really approach the lighting with these highest demands.”
“NSSD and NFRU affected the development of Neural Dawn in that it basically freed up a big performance budget. So we were able to unlock or to turn on the most advanced features of Unreal Engine, like MegaLights.”
“It also sped up the development process a lot, because unlike this industry standard of baking light maps … we can work with fully dynamic lighting.”
Neural Dawn will be launched exclusively on Android devices powered by Arm Mali GPUs later in 2026.
