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Imagination Technologies Reimagines GPUs With Ray Tracing
Imagination Technologies has revealed a ray tracing GPU with high power efficiency and low cost.
www.allaboutcircuits.com/, Jan. 17, 2023 –
Imagination Technologies recently launched IMG DXT, a scalable ray tracing graphics processing unit (GPU) said to unlock cutting-edge graphics for mobile devices. Ray tracing is a technology that creates realistic 3D scenes where light mimics how it behaves in the real world. This technology, however, is traditionally computationally expensive because a processor must track all the rays emitted from a light source and calculate how each ray will interact with a surface or object in a scene–whether it will be absorbed, scattered, reflected, or refracted.
Now, with Imagination's ray acceleration cluster (RAC) technology in the new GPU, mobile phone manufacturers can integrate ray tracing into their system on chips (SoCs). Imagination claims its IMG DXT delivers high performance and power efficiency while being affordable with up to 40% lower area cost. Below are some of Imagination's technologies found in the IMG DXT GPU.
Traditional rendering uses rasterization, a process in which a structure is built using a mesh of triangles that are then shaded to resemble the structure's appearance. With this approach, the real world can only be approximated. Ray tracing replicates, on the other hand, how low light behaves in the real world.
Photons from a light source bounce around the surroundings and reach the viewer's eyes. As the light interacts with objects, it is obstructed, reflected, and refracted, creating realistic shadows and reflections.
Compared to rasterization, ray tracing uses a single algorithm that can create effects without tools like shadow maps or other lighting passes. However, ray tracing is more complex and requires much more effort to use efficiently. Imagination first demonstrated its ray tracing architecture in 2012.
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