Arm is introducing its new Immortalis GPU today, the company’s first mobile GPU to support hardware-based ray tracing. Immortalis-G715 is intended to be the first GPU made by Arm to give stunning ray-traced images on Android smartphones and tablets, like PCs, the most recent Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles, and PCs all steadily move toward this feature.
Built on top of Mali, a GPU used by firms like MediaTek and Samsung, Immortalis is a 10–16 core GPU. It offers a 15% performance improvement over the previous generation of high-end Mali GPUs. As a result of its success with the 8 billion Mali GPUs that have been sold so far, Arm views Immortalis as the beginning of a move to ray tracing on mobile.
According to Andy Craigen, director of product management at Arm, “the difficulty is that Ray Tracing algorithms can utilize substantial power, energy, and space throughout the mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC).” However, Ray Tracing on Immortalis-G715 only occupies 4% of the shader core space while providing performance increases of more than 300% because of the hardware acceleration. Although it’s unclear if a 3x speedup over software-based ray tracing will be enough to entice game developers, Nvidia touted a 2x-3x improvement when it first launched hardware-accelerated ray tracing in its RTX 2080 graphics card. According to Arm’s Paul Williamson, the technology is in the optimal performance position to enter the market right now. He also mentions that it may be useful in augmented reality applications where RT might be used to adjust virtual illumination to the real-world environment around you.
Arm’s Mali-G710 from last year already offers software-based ray tracing, but the promise of hardware support means that around the start of 2023, we will start to see top smartphones equipped with this technology. Manufacturers are preparing for the release of the games as Samsung earlier this year also unveiled its Exynos 2200 processor with hardware-based ray tracing.
Because of the readiness of the hardware, the ecosystem of developers, and our partners, Craigen chose to launch hardware-based Ray Tracing functionality for Immortalis-G715 at this time. There are currently just a few examples of ray tracing on mobile GPUs from Arm, and no game developers have publicly stated their intentions. Williamson continues, “We feel this technology has a huge role, but it’ll take time,” noting that “some great mobile experiences over the next year or two” may be in store.
With the Mali-G715, Arm has also updated its core Mali range. Variable rate shading (VRS) is a feature of this GPU that improves mobile gaming performance and energy efficiency. VRS simply renders the sections of a scene in a game that need greater detail, saving rendering resources for the background details. “We have witnessed increases of up to 40% on frames per second when setting Variable Rate Shading on game material,” adds Craigen. These newest Arm GPUs will be 15% more energy efficient than its previous Mali-G710 GPU, which debuted last year, thanks to other advancements. Arm declined to specify by how much an Immortalis device may cost more than a Mali-based one.
Arm’s decision to enable hardware-based ray tracing on its GPUs marks a big advancement for Android gaming on mobile devices. The most recent Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles and strong GPUs are the only platforms that presently support ray tracing. In a prior demonstration using Arm last year, Nvidia used an RTX 3060 GPU in combination with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 Arm CPU. That work is concentrated on PCs and probably laptops that resemble Chromebooks, but Arm’s new Immortalis is totally dedicated to Android.
Along with sharing a portion of their roadmap, Arm also revealed that Immortalis will be followed by the “Titan” and “Krake” flagship GPUs in 2023 and 2024, respectively. However, Arm refused to say if Titan or Krake will increase ray tracing functionality.
Along with MediaTek and Unity, Epic Games is supporting Immortalis with its Unreal Engine. The level of industry support for a new mobile GPU of this caliber is to be expected, but the true test will be how many mobile game developers begin incorporating ray tracing. (Arm claims to employ the Vulkan API for its ray tracing.) Ray tracing in console games is still relatively uncommon, therefore it’s doubtful that this trend will spread to mobile games anytime soon.
