Chipmaker Arm launched its next-generation mobile GPU on Tuesday. Arm said that the Immortalis-G715 has ray tracing support in its hardware and a 15% performance improvement to enable a better gaming experience on Android phones launching next year.
While Apple , Google and Qualcomm have yet to release chipsets with ray tracing in hardware, Arm is not technically the first. Samsung beat it earlier this year when certain versions of the Samsung Galaxy S22 launched with the company's Exynos 2200 chipset, which included hardware-level ray tracing. Arm is a close second. Ray tracing is a realistic lighting technology that has only been used as a benchmark for desktop gaming in the past few years because no other mobile chipset supports it.
According to a press release, the phone's chipset supports software-based ray tracing, just like Arm's Mali-G710 GPU from last year, but implementing it in hardware will enable "a more realistic and immersive experience."
Immortalis also has another new mobile gaming trick, variable rate shading, which increases framerate by 40% by sharpening graphics where the action happens and rendering elements in the background at a lower resolution.
Arm expects the first phone with Immortalis GPU to launch in 2023. Arm licenses its GPU technology to chipmakers for use in chipsets - for example, last year's Mali-G710 GPU was bundled into MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 chipset, which powers the Oppo Find X5 Pro Dimensity flagship phone.
MediaTek chips are slowly making their way into higher-end phones, but mostly from brands like Oppo and Vivo that don't sell in the United States. Consumers in the U.S. may not be seeing Arm Immortalis GPUs anytime soon.
