It's less a plateau and more scaling boundaries. Mobile chips especially are limited in power and die space so if you want to produce a high-resolution image at

It's less a plateau and more scaling boundaries. Mobile chips especially are limited in power and die space so if you want to produce a high-resolution image at acceptable frame rates, either quality-per-pixel or pixel count have to drop compared to stuff that's plugged into the wall. Each generation of chip on desktop or mobile is still much faster than the previous, but that's battling with increased quality-per-pixel and higher screen resolutions/refresh rates. DLSS/XeSS allow dropping the pixel count and then reconstructing a satisfactory image, which means you can either cut power draw for near-equivalent quality, or use the newly available headroom to improve quality-per-pixel further or deliver higher framerates. One dirty secret when it comes to mobile phones and tablets is that games were already rendering below native resolution - Apple basically told developers to do this in the early Retina era, since it wasn't feasible to render at native with good framerates - since it saves power and the screens are so high-res that most users won't be able to tell the difference. I can't remember the last time I launched a game on my phone and it was actually rendering at native resolution. So in that context, techniques like FSR or this new upscaler are just replacing the existing bilinear/bicubic upscale filter.