ARM’s newest flagship GPU will offer hardware-based ray tracing, a first for the company. Announced today, the Immortalis-G715 promises a 15 percent performance boost compared to the firm’s previous generation of premium Mali GPUs. The performance improvement is courtesy of architectural improvements and a design that can accommodate up to 16 cores.
ARM already offered support for software-based ray tracing with last year’s Mali-G710. However, the company claims the Immortalis-G715 will deliver a 300 percent improvement in ray tracing performance thanks to its dedicated hardware.
Whether you’ll see a mobile title with ray tracing anytime soon is hard to say. Since creating games is so expensive, most developers try to make their projects playable on as many devices as possible. In the immediate future, you’re more likely to see a benefit out of the Immortalis-G715’s support for Variable Rate Shading. VRS is a technology that sees a GPU focus its efforts on rendering the parts of a scene that require the most detail. You likely won’t perceive a drop in visual quality, but the GPU will operate more efficiently. ARM says it saw frame rate improvements of up 40 percent in some games thanks to the tech.
ARM announced two other GPUs today: the Mali-G715 and Mali-G615. Both components incorporate the VRS technology found on their more expensive sibling but don’t offer ray tracing and boast fewer cores for lower overall performance.
Android phones with Immortalis-G715 GPUs will begin arriving in 2023. At least when it comes to timing, ARM is playing catch-up. Samsung’s Exynos 2200, with ray tracing graphics from AMD, is already available on Galaxy S22 phones in Europe and other parts of the world.