Arm Immortalis It is the new GPU with which the British company intends to boost graphic processing in Android smartphones and tablets. Although in recent years we have seen a significant advance in the graphic quality of mobile video games, they are still waiting to receive a technology that is triumphing on consoles and computers: the Ray Tracing (ray tracing).
Now, Ray Tracing, popularized above all by Nvidia graphics cards, demands high-level technical resources. For this reason, we thought that mobile devices would take several years to adopt such a visual proposal. But thanks to the ARM architecture and the company of the same name, today we can say that ray tracing is getting closer to getting into your pocket.
So that, Arm Immortalis-G715 it will be the manufacturer’s high-end GPU. “It was designed to deliver the best gaming experiences on next-generation flagship smartphones. It is the first Arm GPU to offer support for hardware-based Ray Tracing on mobile devices, taking mobile gaming on Android to a whole new level.” “, they mention on their website.
Arm Immortalis represents a 15% jump in performance over lower end GPUs. That is, the Arm Mali. In addition, the company points out that Immortalis offers twice the performance in machine learning processes, which will benefit the gaming experience. Below you can see a demo of Immortalis in action:
Now, it would be logical to think that Arm Immortalis will devour the battery of your terminal. However, from Arm they indicate that have improved energy efficiency by 15%. Obviously, this data will vary depending on the game, device and other factors that influence consumption, so let’s take it with a grain of salt.
“The challenge is that Ray Tracing techniques can use a significant amount of power and energy in a SoC. However, the ray tracing on the Immortalis-G715 only uses 4% of the shader core, while delivering performance gains of over 300% through hardware acceleration.” mentioned Andy Craigen, director of product management at Arm.
Another important point about Arm Immortalis is that it is a scalable performance GPU, as it will be produced in variants ranging from 10 and 16 cores. Of course, this will depend on the needs of the SoC manufacturer. Samsung and MediaTek already used Arm Mali in their chips, so it would not be strange to think that they will be the same partners that will bet on Immortalis.
According to Arm, Immortalis was born because the hardware of some current smartphones and tablets, and those that will come in the coming years, is ready to be adopted. Of course, it is a fact that this GPU will be intended only for high-end devices, at least initially. Arm’s goal is for Immortalis to debut on various devices in early 2023.
“Arm believes that ray tracing represents a paradigm shift in mobile gaming content. We decided to introduce hardware-based ray tracing support now on the Immortalis-G715 because our partners are ready, the hardware is ready, and the developer ecosystem is about to be ready.”