ARM introduces - Immortalis-G715 - its first GPU with hardware ray tracing support

ARM introduced the newest mobile flagship GPU, that will offer hardware-based ray tracing, a first for the company. The Immortalis-G715 promises a 15 percent performance upgrade 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 implemented support for software-based ray tracing with last year’s Mali-G710 GPU. But the company claims the Immortalis-G715 will deliver a 300 percent improvement in ray tracing performance thanks to its dedicated hardware.

The degree of progress depends on a variety of factors, including the hardware. Whether you'll ever see a mobile game with ray tracing is difficult to predict. Making video games is so costly, so most producers aim to make their products playable on as many platforms as possible. In the immediate future, support for Variable Rate Shading in the Immortalis-G715 will provide a benefit.

VRS is a technology that sees a GPU focus its efforts on rendering the parts of a scene that require the most detail. You won’t perceive a drop in visual quality, but the GPU will operate more efficiently. ARM promises frame rate improvements of up 40 percent in some games thanks to the tech.

ARM also 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 hardware ray tracing and include fewer cores for lower overall performance. Android phones with Immortalis-G715 GPUs will begin arriving in 2023. 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.