Arm announced a new flagship mobile GPU as part of a roadmap of upcoming CPUs and GPUs this week. Called Immortalis and sporting at least 10 cores, it will bring hardware-based ray tracing and a new execution engine to high-end Android phones. It will also feature Variable Rate Shading (VRS) to save performance and battery life.
Ray tracing requires significant horsepower which initially kept it out of the mobile space, but mobile hardware appears to be rising to meet that challenge. Last year’s Mali-G710 already supports software ray tracing, but its successor is transitioning to hardware ray tracing similar to that of Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards, AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series consoles.
