Arm's impressive Neural Dawn is a ray-traced mobile game built for next-gen Arm Mali GPUs

Neural Dawn is an impressive new mobile game co-developed by Arm and Sumo Digital, created in part to showcase the capabilities of Arm Neural Technology in next-gen Arm Mali GPUs that are set to hit the mobile space later this year. Launching exclusively on Android, Neural Dawn is also the first game to make use of Unreal Engine MegaLights, the impressive ray-traced lighting tech that delivers high-end desktop-class visuals.

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As seen in Neural Dawn, Arm Neural Technology leverages AI-powered solutions to improve image fidelity and performance, much like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS in the PC space. Here, it includes Neural Super Sampling (upscaling), Denoising (NSSD), and Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU). The latter is Arm's take on Frame Generation, while the AI denoiser should hopefully deliver results close to NVIDIA's DLSS Ray Reconstruction or AMD's FSR Ray Regeneration.

Part game, part tech demo created to showcase what's possible with mobile games, Neural Dawn will ship with around two hours of gameplay across four levels as players follow a research scientist exploring a cave network to uncover the "truth behind a collapsing civilization." Lighting plays a major role in how the game plays out, which makes it all the more impressive that this will be the first mobile game to use Unreal Engine 5.6.1 and Unreal Engine MegaLights in real time.

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MegaLights is an impressive bit of technology as it opens the door to large numbers of ray-traced dynamic lights in a single scene, with Arm noting that it's thanks to Arm Neural Technology that it's able to render Neural Dawn at a playable frame-rate.

"Arm Neural Technology creates higher-quality experiences within a mobile power envelope, helping remove some of the longstanding barriers between mobile and desktop gaming," the company says in the announcement. "This level of lighting on mobile has historically carried a high performance and power cost. Arm Neural Technology helps offset that cost by reducing the workload required to produce high-quality images and smooth motion. This enables advanced real-time, ray-traced lighting within the power constraints of a mobile platform."

And for developers, neural rendering and powerful ray-tracing can speed up the development process when there's no need to carefully light and pre-bake each scene. Arm notes that a relatively small team of 17 at Sumo Digital created Neural Dawn in 18 months, including all pre-production.