Arm announces its new flagship Immortalis graphics processor today, the first to include hardware-based beam tracking on mobile devices. As PCs and the latest Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles gradually move to impressive ray-tracking visuals, the Immortalis-G715 is designed to be the first Arm graphics processor to deliver the same to Android phones and tablets.
Built on Mali, a GPU used by MediaTek and Samsung, Immortalis is designed with 10-16 cores and promises a 15 percent boost over the previous-generation Mali GPUs. Arm sees Immortalis as the beginning of a transition to beam tracking on mobile devices after its success with the 8 billion Mali GPUs shipped so far.
The new GPU Immortalis will have 10 or more cores. Image: Arm
“The challenge is that beam tracking techniques can use significant power, energy and area in a mobile-on-a-chip (SoC) system,” explains Andy Cragan, director of product management at Arm. “However, the Immortalis-G715’s Ray Tracing uses only 4 percent of the shader’s core, while providing more than 300 percent performance improvements through hardware acceleration. It’s unclear whether 3x acceleration over software-based beam tracking will be enough to tempt game developers, but when Nvidia introduced hardware-accelerated beam tracking in its RTX 2080, it advertised a 2x-3x magnification at the time. “So far, this is the right performance point to bring this technology to market,” said Paul Williamson of Arm, adding that it could also be useful in augmented reality applications, where RT can be used to map virtual lighting. with the real world environment. you.
Arm is already delivering software-based beam tracking in last year’s Mali-G710, but the promise of hardware support means we’ll start seeing flagship smartphones with this chip in early 2023. Samsung also announced its Exynos 2200 chip with hardware-based beam tracing earlier this year, so manufacturers are preparing for the arrival of the games.
“We decided to introduce hardware-based support for Ray Tracing now on the Immortalis-G715 because our partners are ready, the hardware is ready and the developer ecosystem is (on the way to being) ready,” says Craigon. Arm provides just a few examples of beam tracking on its mobile GPUs today, and there is still no clear commitment from game developers. “We believe this technology has a strong place, but it will take time,” Williamson said, hinting that we should see “some interesting mobile experiences next year.”
Arm also has an update to its main Mali line with the Mali-G715. This graphics processor includes variable speed shading (VRS) to increase gaming performance and save power on mobile devices. The VRS essentially depicts the parts of a scene in a game that require more detail, so the details in the background do not need as much rendering power. “When we enabled variable speed content shading, we saw improvements of up to 40 percent frames per second,” says Regan. Other improvements mean that these latest Arm GPUs will get a 15% energy efficiency improvement over their previous Mali-G710 GPU, which was introduced last year. Arm wouldn’t say how much more expensive an Immortalis device can be than a Mali-based one.
Arm’s move to support hardware-based beam tracking of its GPUs is a significant step for Android mobile games. Ray tracking is currently limited to the powerful GPUs typically found in gaming PCs or the latest Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles. Nvidia previously demonstrated beam tracking in connection with the Arm last year, but it was an RTX 3060 GPU paired with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 Arm processor. These efforts are focused on computers and probably Chromebook-like laptops, but Arm’s new Immortalis focuses directly on Android.
Arm also shared part of its roadmap, which you can see above, suggesting that it will be followed by Immortalis with its flagship GPU “Titan” in 2023 and “Krake” in 2024. Arm declined to say whether Titan or Krake will extend the beam tracking support however.
Epic Games puts its support behind Immortalis with its Unreal Engine, along with MediaTek and Unity. This is the type of industrial support you would expect for a new mobile GPU like this, but the real test will be how many mobile game developers are starting to implement beam tracking. (Arm says its beam tracking will use the Vulkan API.) It’s still incredibly rare to see beam tracking in console games, so it’s unlikely we’ll soon see a stream of mobile games switching to beam tracking.
Additional reports by Sean Hollister.
Correction, June 28 11:50 AM ET: The article has been updated with more details about Immortalis, and to make it clear, this is the first Arm beam tracking hardware chip, not the first in the industry.
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