Dimensity 9500 GPU tipped to arrive with significant ray tracing performance improvements

Previous leaks extensively discussed the Dimensity 9500's CPU performance thanks to its new Arm Cortex-X930 CPU core, hinting at a 49% increase in single-core performance. If a leak from Ice Universe is accurate, its GPU (referred to as Drage) won't be too far behind. While its previous Geekbench showing was less than ideal, that is expected from pre-production hardware.

Ice says it is 40% more power efficient compared to the Immortalis-G925. Additionally, it offers 40% better raytracing performance and can supposedly deliver 100+ FPS in unspecified titles. For now, only a handful of titles, such as Diablo Immortal, War Thunder, Honour of Kings and Arena Blackout, support the technology.

The above-mentioned Geekbench listing told us the Dimensity 9500 would launch with an Arm Mali-G1-Ultra MC12 GPU. It is a part of Arm's broader rebrand for mobile IP, which also involves renaming Cortex CPU cores to Lumex. It has 12 cores or 24 pipelines, unchanged from the last generation.

The Dimensity 9500 faces stiff competition from Qualcomm's Adreno 840 and Samsung's Xclipse 960. Not much is known about the former, but the latter shows promising results in initial benchmark leaks. But, as is the case with every Xclipse GPU, it might be hamstrung by a CPU that can't keep up and poor thermals resulting from Samsung Foundry's SF2 node.