ARM reveals three new GPUs as well as the new “Immortalis” line with hardware-based ray tracing for the first time!

The new Immortalis series will shift away from Mali and would provide flagship-level gaming performance!

ARM has revealed three new GPUs, two in the Mali line, the Mali-G615, and Mali-G715, and one from its newest series, the Immortalis-G715. The latter GPU is intended for flagships and has hardware-based ray tracing features!

Mali has always been the heart of ARM’s GPU lineup with over 8 billion sold worldwide. However, to make things simpler, the Mali line will be split with the new Immortalis line, where the latter will provide discreet graphics for gaming and flagship phones.

The new Mali GPUs have at least 6 cores in them (6 or fewer for Mali-G615, 7-9 cores for Mali-G715) and feature a new execution engine as well as variable-rate shading which should improve the rendering of graphics in high-intensity games like Genshin Impact. ARM claims that these two new Mali GPUs have a 15% performance boost over the previous Mali GPUs. Meanwhile, the flagship Immortalis-G715 has 10 cores or more, depending on the chipset maker’s configurations.

In addition, the new Mali-G615 and G715 provide the best power efficiency within their range. According to ARM, the new GPUs defeat the competition for both peak and sustained workloads. This efficiency would make frame rates potentially rise up to 40% in addition to lessening the strain and consumption of the battery. Machine Learning has also vastly improved. Now, they provide twice the better architectural improvements in terms of ML.

And finally, ARM mentioned that the new GPUs are more friendly to developers. The GPUs are supported by a “wide and comprehensive set of developer resources and tools” to help them optimize their games and applications much more conveniently.

RAY TRACING ON THE IMMORTALIS-G715

ARM has released a series of demos showcasing the Immortalis-G715’s ray-tracing capabilities. The new ray-tracing capabilities process and render shadows much better although obviously, it is nowhere as realistic or as impressive as those on PC graphics, such as on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX3090.

In the comparison, the graphics with ray-tracing shows better shading and the shadows pop out more. The main challenge involved in ray tracing in smartphones is the way it is processed without killing the battery as the process uses a large number of resources within the GPU and chipset’s power, straining the battery.

According to ARM, the Immortalis-G715 only uses 4 percent of the shader core area while also accelerating 300 percent performance improvements through the means of hardware acceleration, which is an impressive feat for smartphones.

If you could recall, the Mali-G710 already has software-based ray tracing. This is the GPU used to power the flagship Mediatek Dimensity 9000, the first-ever 4nm chipset. Because the ray tracing on the Immortalis-G715 is hardware-based, it could bring better improvements to graphics as it does not rely on code or AI alone anymore, and ray tracing is already embedded within the GPU itself.

You can read more about the three new GPUs through ARM’s website. Expect these new GPUs to come with the next generation of Mediatek and possibly, UNISOC chipsets.