The author | Wei Shiwei
Edit | Shi Yaqiong
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On the afternoon of November 5th, Imagination Technologies launched a new generation of flagship GPU IP - img cxt, and equipped with the first powervr photon ray tracing architecture optimized for mobile, which means that mobile gamers and developers will get desktop-level ray tracing capabilities.
The architecture of img cxt has been greatly expanded, especially in terms of ray tracing performance, the img cxt 48-1536 rt3 core has added three new ray acceleration clusters (rac), ray tracing performance up to 1.3gray/s, supporting high frame rates in mobile devices to achieve realistic ray-traced shadows, reflections, global illumination and environmental occlusion effects.
In terms of rasterized graphics processing performance, compared with the previous generation img bxt series, the calculation, texture, and geometric performance of cxt are improved by 50%, and the fp32 rasterization performance of up to 9 tflops can be achieved, the light tracking performance is 7.8 gray/s, and the ai computing power is up to 6 tops.
cxt rt3 performance demonstration (Image source: imagination)
In fact, in order to clarify the implementation of ray tracing functions in different performance and efficiency levels, last year imagination developed a ray tracing rating system (rtls), dividing a total of 6 levels of ray tracing function requirements from level 0 to level 5. The img cxt adopts a photon architecture of RTLS 4, and the power efficiency is 2.5 times higher than that of the existing RTLS 2/3 level.
Specifically, the main feature of the photon architecture is the rac, a low-power dedicated hardware GPU component that includes a ray store, a ray task scheduler, and a coherency gatherer.
Photon is also tightly coupled with two 128-wide unified shader clusters (USCs), which have high-speed dedicated data paths for efficient, low-power ray-traced deployments. Compared to the less efficient rtls Level 2 architecture, photon accelerates and offloads more ray-traced computations from the shader core.
cxt ray tracing effect display (Image source: imagination)
Ray tracing technology has long been mainly used in the field of games, which simulates the real world light changes, reflections, reflections and other characteristics, in the game world to show a 3D scene highly similar to the real world light and shadow. But because of the technology's high demands on computational complexity, it is more used on desktop and gaming machine devices.
The launch of the img cxt and its photon architecture means that the application of ray tracing technology will be extended to a wider range of fields such as gaming, mobile, AR (augmented reality), data centers and autonomous driving.
For example, on the automotive human-machine interface (HMI) platform, cxt enables more realistic image and area displays for applications and devices such as surround view, satellite navigation, and heads-up displays (huds), as well as in-car gaming and entertainment experiences.
At present, cxt has been licensed in multiple markets, and more C series GPU products will be released in the future.
In 2020, imagination revenue was $125 million (about 800 million yuan), an increase of 44% year-on-year. From the perspective of market segmentation, the company's mobile GPU market share is 37%, and the automotive GPU market share is 45%.