In brief: In early November, Imagination Technologies unveiled its latest and most advanced graphics processor, which is supposed to make ray tracing a reality on mobile devices. More recently, it has gone into greater detail, explaining what'southward behind its ray tracing architecture and what applications it has planned in gaming and beyond.

Imagination claims to bring ray tracing to mobile with the IMG-CXT, the latest entry in the PowerVR series. Though it isn't apparent where the hardware will stop upward, the specifications on Imagination's website say it volition back up Linux and Android. The omission of iOS is somewhat peculiar, considering the history of the companies.

Imagination Technologies had worked with Apple tree since 2006, providing GPUs for iPhones, just had a falling out in 2022. Nonetheless, Apple repaired its relationship with the graphics supplier in 2022. At present that Apple is producing its own silicon, it may simply be that it no longer needs Imagination for iPhone graphics hardware, but that'due south speculative at best.

Last calendar week on its blog, Imagination started to explain what'southward behind its Photon ray tracing architecture, even linking to a whitepaper. Diagrams on Imagination's website detail its Ray Acceleration Cluster, which Photon uses to manage all ray-tracing capabilities (above).

Imagination'south website specifies that the IMG-CXT should evangelize up to ane.3G gigarays per second (GRay/due south) for ray traced shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections, and global illumination. In comparing, Nvidia's mid-range RTX 2060 desktop GPU delivers around 5GRay/s. That is a lot more than from a nearly three-yr-onetime GPU, but the RTX 2060 is a full desktop component that doesn't accept to worry about draining a phone or tablet battery.

The IMG-CXT'south traditional rendering functioning is as well supposed to be an upgrade over the previous IMG-A serial and B-series GPUs. Information technology currently supports several graphics APIs, including Vulkan, OpenGL, and Android NN HAL. Imagination says information technology is intended for "premium smartphones." In addition to gaming, the company suggests the IMG-CXT's ray tracing could also be used to make interior decorating simulations more realistic, or the automotive manufacture could employ it for more than realistic virtual representations of cars.