What They Say
Arm has a new GPU, the Immortalis (how modest!) that offers hardware ray-tracing for the first time in one of the firm’s designs. It also claims a 15% boost in performance from its latest GPUs. Last year’s Mali-G710 in the Mediatek Dimensity 9000 chipset had software support only.
In a blog post it said that ray tracing uses only 4% of the shader core area while boosting performance by 300%. It also said that it uses what it calls “Variable Rate Shading”, which is analagous to foveated rendering – with higher resolution in some areas than others, but doesn’t use eye tracking to decide where the user is looking.
What We Think
There are very short demo loops on YouTube here and here.
I got caught up in the hype about Nvidia’s development a few years ago at Siggraph, but in the end, as my friend Jon Peddie says “When I’m in a battle for my gaming life, I’m not admiring the scenery”. There are games where the visual impact is really critical, though, and bringing those to mobile will do no harm to the development of the huge category of mobile gaming.
Arm is nowhere near the first company to talk about ray tracing in mobile. We first discussed it, I think, with Imagination Technologies at CES in 2016! (Imagination Working on Foveated Rendering). That firm was bought by a private equity firm, Canyon Bridge in 2017 and The Times reported last year that it is looking at another listing in ‘three to four years’. After falling out with Apple, it made a licensing deal with the firm in 2020. (BR)
