Imagination releases first D-Series GPU offering premium ray tracing
Premium ray tracing for mobile gaming applications is offered with the IMG DXT GPU, said Imagination Technologies. It is first D-Series GPU and allows mobile device manufacturers to integrate ray tracing into SoCs and for it to be a mainstream technology and scaling up from premium to mainstream devices, said Imagination.
The GPU scales from an area-efficient half ray acceleration cluster (RAC) configuration up to a high performance four-RAC design, to cover a range of applications, from simple shadowing in hybrid implementations to premium ray-traced graphics for AAA content.
The GPU has support for fragment shading rate (FSR) for Vulkan which decreases the number of fragments processed and therefore “significantly increases” graphics performance with minimal impact on visual quality, said Imagination. FSR also makes ray-traced effects more efficient as fewer rays are sent into the scene. The result is realistic lights and shadows achieved within a smaller silicon area.
The DXT-72-2304 configuration delivers 72GTexels per second and 2.5TFLOPs of FP32 arithmetic performance, with a 50 per cent higher maximum single core performance compared to the previous generation. DXT cores offer 20 per cent better performance density per area than the IMG CXT GPUs, and at the same time reducing power requirements.
The DXT GPUs are designed to meet the mobile gaming market’s demand for low power operation balanced with realistic and immersive graphics. The scalable IMG DXT cores work at multiple levels of implementation, starting with basic graphics integrations, up to flagship SoCs with desktop-level ray-traced visuals, explained David Harold, Imagination’s chief marketing officer.
The IMG DXT GPU comes in the area-efficient half-sized ray acceleration cluster (RAC) configuration, and single, dual, or quad-RAC configurations.
DXT’s Photon architecture is claimed to be the only ray tracing design that sits at Level 4 on the Ray Tracing Levels System (RTLS) for power-efficient visuals. As a result all of Imagination’s ray tracing solutions sit at Level 4 regardless of RAC configuration, ensuring DXT offers usable ray tracing at up to 40 per cent lower area cost, compared to the same mobile configuration as CXT, said the company.
The IMG DXT GPU has a patented mode inside its texture processing unit (TPU) that creates a “fast path” for post-processing effects. The result is a near doubling of bilinear filtering performance with minimal area growth and an overall reduction in power consumption, said Imagination. The mode accelerates tasks such as post-processing effects in games and computational photography filter processing. The higher throughput of the GPU also enables improved ray-traced image quality through faster and more power-efficient denoising algorithms.
A new shader processing unit (SPU) design is included in the DXT. The GPU delivers 50 per cent more top-end compute and texture (ALU/TPU) performance per SPU, thanks to a new triple Universal Shader Cluster (USC) design (three ALU / TPU units), where previous architectures focused only on a dual-USC design, to result in the 72GTexels per second and 2.5TFLOPs FP32 at a clock frequency of 1GHz, said Imagination.
