Arm to Bring Ray Tracing to Smartphones With 'Immortalis' GPU

pcmag.com:

Chip designer Arm is preparing to bring hardware-based ray tracing to flagship smartphones through a new GPU called the Immortalis-G715. 

The company introduced(Opens in a new window) the GPU on Tuesday, hailing it as a major advancement for mobile gaming graphics. Ray-tracing technology is already common on the latest PC graphics cards, enabling eligible games to display realistic lighting and shadow effects. 

Now Arm says it designed a GPU capable of rendering the same effects on a smartphone. The company posted a few video clips demoing the ray-tracing technology in action. 

As you can see, the enhanced lighting and shadow effects dramatically improve the look of a mobile game by adding realistic details to gaming environments.

Arm says the major challenge with ray tracing is how the technology usually consumes lots of energy. “However, Ray Tracing on Immortalis-G715(Opens in a new window) only uses 4 percent of the shader core area, while delivering more than 300 percent performance improvements through the hardware acceleration,” the company says. 

Specifically, Arm added several dedicated "ray-tracing units" within the GPU, which can scale up to 10 to 16 cores.

The Immortalis-G715 is slated to appear in flagship smartphones at the start of 2023. “We see this as the foundation for the ecosystem to start exploring Ray Tracing techniques for their gaming content,” the company added. “This will help to prepare for a fully fledged transition to Ray Tracing on mobile as the technology continues to evolve in the next several years.”

The Immortalis-G715 has also been designed to offer variable rate shading(Opens in a new window), another feature on existing PC graphics cards. This technique can streamline the pixel