Imagination introduces IMG DXT mobile GPU with ray tracing scalable for all smartphone price points

British graphics processor maker Imagination Technologies is readying the IMG DXT mobile GPU with ray tracing support that can be scaled for mobile SoCs ranging from entry-level to high-end. Most of the existing mobile GPUs with ray tracing can only be found on premium solutions right now, but Imagination aims to make ray tracing available to mainstream solutions, as well. Thus, entry-level SoCs can integrate an area-efficient half ray acceleration cluster (RAC), while high-end SoCs could include a four-RAC design.

As far as performance goes, Imagination’s flagship DXT-72-2304 variant delivers 72 GTexeles/s and 2.5 TFLOPs of FP32 floating point operations. Single-core performance has been boosted by 50% with 20% better performance density per area over previous CXT gen.

The new DXT GPUs feature an updated Photon ray tracing architecture that is said to be the only design to offer Level 4 on the Ray Tracing Level System, allowing it to process high-quality visuals in the most power-efficient manner regardless of ray acceleration cluster size.

A new feature introduced by the DXT GPUs is the Fragment Shading Rate (FSR) for the Vulkan API. Imagination’s FSR technique can reduce the number of times a GPU calculates framebuffered pixel information for a given scene with minimal image quality loss. This significantly cuts down bandwidth usage and power consumption. FSR also makes ray-traced effects more efficient as fewer rays are sent into the scene. Additionally, The IMG DXT GPU has an innovative patented special mode inside its texture processing unit (TPU) that creates a “fast path” for post-processing effects like TAA denoising.

Optimal performance is ensured via an updated PowerVR SDK that now includes a DDK with extended ray tracing capabilities and Wulkan RT support. Imagination offers compatibility with industry standard ARM architecture, but it is also among the first to bring RISC-V compatibility, which enables lower power requirements.

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