Arm has announced a new flagship graphics processor – Immortalis-G715, its first GPU with hardware support for ray tracing.

Built on the Valhall architecture, the processor can have from 10 to 16 cores and a second-level cache from 512 KB to 2 MB. Arm considers Immortalis to be the beginning of the transition of ray tracing from PCs and consoles to mobile devices – according to a company representative, this technology requires a powerful system, can consume a significant amount of energy, and occupy a large area of mobile SoC. However, ray tracing on the Immortalis-G715 uses only 4% of shader computers compared to the software implementation and is 300% more productive.

Arm implemented software beam tracing last year on the Mali-G710 GPU, but the promised threefold increase in performance due to hardware support, the company hopes, will “tempt” game developers to start implementing this technology in their projects. It is not yet known when to expect the first smartphones with this GPU, but we can hope that they will start appearing in early 2023.

We remind that the Immortalis-G715 is not the first mobile GPU with hardware ray tracing. In January Samsung introduced the Exynos 2200 processor with Xclipse GPU, based on the AMD RDNA 2 architecture. It is already used in the company’s smartphones in the Galaxy S22 line.