With the Immortalis G715, chip developer ARM has presented its first graphics unit that also supports ray tracing.
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ARM wants to make ray tracing possible on smartphones.
© arm.com
On the current Xbox Series X/S and Playstation 5 consoles, ray tracing is currently on everyone’s lips. The hardware-based simulation of light and shadow creates more believable game worlds. More and more players want such beautiful light calculations on their smartphones too. The chip developer ARM wants to make ray tracing possible on smartphones with the graphics unit it has just introduced.
Mali or Immortalis
The Immortalis G715 called GPU masters hardware-based ray tracing and contains further improvements, especially in energy efficiency – particularly important for mobile devices. According to ARM, future flagship smartphones should no longer have their own Mali GPUs installed, but graphics units from the Immortalis series. In contrast, Mali GPUs should continue to work in mid-range and premium smartphones.
Frame rate vs. battery life
The fastest chip from ARM is called the Immortalis G715, and the Mali G715 and G615 are two more new GPUs that do not enable hardware-based ray tracing, but do offer new energy saving modes. The energy saving was made possible by supporting the variable shading rate. Only the directly viewed areas of a game are calculated in full resolution. The content on the edge, on the other hand, is displayed with reduced resolution. The result is either higher frame rates or longer battery life.
Ray tracing in your pocket
However, it remains unclear in which devices the new ray tracing GPU from ARM will be used first. However, smartphone gamers should welcome the fact that ray tracing will soon be within reach on the go.
Ray tracing: This is how the technology works
