Mobile GPUs lag desktop GPUs by many years in terms of features, so they’re not always conducive to exciting coverage. However, hardware ray tracing (RT) is on an ARM GPU design a milestone worthless.
In his new Immortalis G715 (cool name btw) graphics unit, ARM supplies one 300% performance Improvement over the previous software solution at a cost of 4% of shader core area. It seems like a very reasonable number for a feature that isn’t widely used in mobile games.
Therefore, it seems prudent that ARM introduces a hardware feature that developers can test. Meanwhile, costs for OEMs and end users remain contained. The I-G715 will also serve as an excellent platform for driver and graphics API teams to further validate their work.
Finally, how the architecture behaves with the first round of apps is examined in detail.
ARM was also added VRS (Variable Rate Shading). This feature allows graphics programmers to define areas of the screen that could be rendered at half or quarter resolution since there is no noticeable detail (like smoke, fog, etc.). While not directly related to ray tracing, VRS can improve overall performance and help introduce ray tracing as a small part of overall frame rendering.
The critical information we don’t have is how many rays can be cast per second. I’m just assuming the acceleration structure is efficient, but we don’t know either. ARM has shown a demo where you can see a “with vs. without” ray-traced scene.
When this is the case, the ray-traced scene will exhibit transparency, reflections, and shadows, three elements that tend to benefit first from ray tracing compared to rasterization. While I find the difference artificially exaggerated, it’s a decent way of explaining what RT is all about, especially for non-experts.
Keep in mind that scenes, including actual PC games, are not typically rendered entirely using RT, but the aspects listed above are generally part of early simple RT demos.
Given the relative lack of shadow softness and reflection/refraction consuming fewer rays, I’d say so performance is not high, was also not to be expected. The camera was also static, so I’m not sure if everything is re-rendered every frame. Again, this could be due to performance and would be a classic demo trick.
Without soft shadows and global + dynamic lighting, it’s hard to judge whether ARM has achieved the most important part of modern hardware ray tracing: the denoise. Perhaps this could be the subject of further research or investigation in the future.
The ray tracing energy efficiency could be higher than a PC GPU. That would be something ARM might want to communicate about (if notable).
Luckily, many game developers have experience with RT on PC, and some of their workflows have worked. Don’t expect many flashy effects on mobile just yet, but I can tell you that nothing will stop the arrival of ray tracing on mobile. It’s inevitable.
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