At the end of 2022, the latest flagship mobile phone SoCs released by MediaTek and Qualcomm have an important feature-support hardware-level ray tracing technology.
At the beginning of 2023, Imagination Technology, the world’s fourth largest provider of silicon IP and a leader in hardware-level mobile ray tracing technology, released its second-generation hardware-level ray tracing IP IMG DXT. With its scalable features, smartphones Hardware-level ray tracing can be used from the mainstream to the flagship level, promoting the popularization of mobile ray tracing technology.
Leifeng.com learned that IMG DXT is expected to be commercially available within 18-24 months.
This means that 2023 will be a critical year for mobile phones to support ray tracing, and 2.6 billion mobile gamers are one step closer to experiencing ray tracing games on mobile phones.
In the past few years, news about mobile ray tracing technology has been continuously released, but it has not been widely applied on smartphones for a long time. What is the reason?
David Harold, chief marketing officer of Imagination, believes that “the main reason is that although their technology is successful, the energy consumption is too large to be practically applied on mobile phones. This also precisely reflects our L4-level ray tracing’s optimization of performance and energy consumption. importance.”
In addition to technology, ecology is a long-term and important factor affecting mobile ray tracing. What kind of solution did Imagination give this time?
Two major problems in the popularization of mobile ray tracing
Ray tracing technology creates a three-dimensional (3D) scene that is almost the same as real life by simulating the performance of light in the real world, which can make the lighting in the 3D game scene closer to the refraction and reflection in real life.
By comparing the same scene with ray tracing turned on and without ray tracing technology, such as the shadows on the walls under the sun, and the detailed rendering of any sharks in the water, it is easy to find out that ray tracing technology is beneficial to gamers who are looking for a more immersive and realistic experience. , is a very tempting technical upgrade, but it is very computationally resource intensive.
” Any mobile phone that claims to have ray tracing technology that can be seen on the market today is actually a first-level software solution, and the energy consumption will be very scary when it is actually used. ” David Harold said bluntly.
Power consumption is also the number one technical problem for the popularization of mobile ray tracing. The key to this question is the way ray tracing is implemented, which can be better understood with the help of the grading of ray tracing GPUs proposed by Imagination.
When Imagination released the first hardware-level ray tracing GPU IP at the end of 2021, it proposed the Ray Tracing Level System (RTLS):
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Level 1 is a software solution on existing hardware. Low performance and low efficiency.
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Level 2 adds the first piece of hardware for ray tracing. Increases the efficiency of basic ray tracing effects compared to level 1.
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Level 3 adds hardware to process the emitted light, resulting in significantly lower power consumption compared to Level 2 solutions.
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Level 4 adds a coherent aggregation function, which greatly improves performance for complex desktop-level effects, allowing it to be applied under mobile power budgets.
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Level 5 is a future level that enables a larger number of dynamic objects in the scene, with additional hardware acceleration.
“If a company wants to proudly claim ray tracing technology, the first step is to start at the software level.” Stephen Barton, senior director of technical product management at Imagination, said, ” The problem of implementing ray tracing in software is also obvious. Computing Very high overhead and power consumption. ”
Obviously, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th hardware-level ray tracing solutions are the basis for the popularization of ray tracing on the mobile side. According to Imagination’s classification, the current mainstream GPU providers are between the 2nd and 3.5th levels, and only Imagination’s previously released IMG CXT and the latest IMG DXT ray tracing GPU are at the fourth level.
But hardware alone is not enough. Developers, applications and software ecology are another major problem hindering ray tracing.
Stephen Barton said, “The promotion of ray tracing on the mobile terminal really needs an ecosystem. Only when hardware-level ray tracing touches most end markets, game developers will be willing to develop games with ray tracing functions, otherwise they will lack motivation.”
So how can we solve these two challenges?
Allow mainstream and high-end mobile phones to use hardware-level ray tracing
With the popularity of mobile ray tracing, hardware and ecology actually complement each other.
“Our previous generation of IMG CXT GPU is already level 4 ray tracing, but it is more for high-end equipment, there is no way to achieve this capability for mainstream models. This may make developers feel that there is no need to develop A large amount of ray tracing content.” David Harold believes, “Only when the power consumption overhead of mobile ray tracing is within an acceptable range and spread to more mobile devices as soon as possible, developers of ray tracing content will be more willing to develop more Lots of content.”
This is also an important feature of the newly released IMG DXT, which can cover mainstream to high-end mobile phones, and supports various applications from simple shadows in hybrid implementations to advanced light-tracking images in 3A masterpieces.
In fact, this is thanks to the IMG DXT series of scalable ray tracing RAC (Ray Acceleration Cluster). From the low configuration of 0.5 RAC, which provides 216MB/s optical calculation capability and 8GB optical and detection computing capability, to the high configuration of 4 RAC, which provides 1.5GB ray tracing computing power and 64GB photosynthetic detection capability.
Ike, technical director of Imagination China, pointed out, ” With the scalable 0.5 RAC to 4 RAC of the DXT series, our scalable ray tracing technology can be applied to all levels of mobile phone fields. Mainstream device manufacturers pursuing product differentiation can choose Area-saving half-size Ray Acceleration Cluster (RAC) configurations, while OEMs looking for high-end performance can choose single, dual or quad RAC configurations for the ultimate mobile viewing experience.”
According to Leifeng.com, DXT adopts the Photon architecture, which is currently the only light-tracking design that reaches the RTLS level 4. There are three configurations: DXT-8-256, DXT-48-1536, and DXT-72-2304. They are respectively aimed at the mainstream, high-end and flagship smartphone markets.
“No matter how the RAC is configured, DXT can reduce the area cost of providing usable light tracing by 40% compared with CXT in the same mobile configuration.” Ike said.
DXT-72-2304, the flagship product of the performance benchmark of the DXT series, has 72 GTexels/s and 2.5 TFLOP FP32 computing power. Compared with the previous generation, the maximum single-core performance has increased by 50%. Moreover, the performance density per unit area of the DXT core is 20% higher than that of the IMG CXT GPU, and the power consumption is also greatly reduced.
The combination of ray tracing technology and Fragment Shading Rate (FSR) technology can achieve a more realistic picture with less power consumption. The combination of these two technologies is called “golden partner” by Ike.
FSR is a technology that can reduce the number of fragment shader runs with almost no reduction in image quality, and can reduce occupied bandwidth and power consumption.
Looking at specific scenarios, whether or not FSR technology is used will hardly make a difference to the naked eye, but it can be found from the heat map that after using FSR technology, a lot of computing resources can be saved. In the most extreme case, shader code can be executed only once for a 4×4 fragment region, reducing the workload by nearly 94%.
In addition to being the golden partner of ray tracing and FSR, DXT has many features that make it a good balance between performance and power efficiency. Such as 2D dual rate texture processing, many advanced games rely on a large number of texture sampling to achieve advanced filtering effects. An innovative, patented special mode built into the Texture Processing Unit (TPU) of the IMG DXT GPU creates a “fast pass” for these post-processing effects, minimizing increase in area and reduce overall power consumption.
The RISC-V firmware processor is also used, which brings a 40% performance improvement in scheduling.
These features can support the needs of mobile games for more immersive experience, higher game performance, and higher energy efficiency.
The core behind it is the Ray Acceleration Cluster (RAC) in the IMG DXT Photon architecture. BTU, DTTU, and PTU units implement second-level ray tracing. With PCG-related analysis, classification, aggregation, and backtracking capabilities, third-level ray tracing is realized, plus ray storage and a scheduler for ray tasks. etc., combined together to reach the fourth level in the RTLS level.
The flexible and scalable architecture has laid the foundation for the large-scale application of mobile ray tracing, but to popularize and have an excellent application experience, ecology is a more far-reaching factor.
Ray Tracing Can Only Be Popularized Little by Little
Allowing hardware-level ray tracing to cover all levels of mobile terminals will give developers more motivation to develop ray tracing games. To further promote the ecology of mobile ray tracing, developers need to be able to get started easily.
” We divide developers into two categories. One is experts who specialize in 3A masterpieces and are willing to make their own engines. The main way they use is to expand in Valkan and use ray tracing technology to develop through API interface connection. Game development related to ray tracing is not a problem.” Stephen Barton said, “The other category is developers who will use Unity, Unreal or O3DE engines. Faced with this type of developers, we cooperate with O3DE. Developers only need to follow Guide step by step to complete the relevant settings for lighting the scene light.”
Whether using Valkan extensions or using mainstream engines, a lot of optimization must be done to meet the power consumption and performance requirements of mobile terminals, and to ensure compliance with the original development process of game developers.
Stephen Barton introduced, “A few years ago, when many game manufacturers began to transplant 3A masterpieces to mobile terminals, they couldn’t avoid the optimization process. It is precisely because of this that we provide corresponding tools, such as PVR2, which allows many developers to easily accept our tools. Guidance to complete the deployment of ray tracing technology”
Imagination already has ecological construction and reserves in ray tracing, including cooperation with the O3DE open source engine, participating in the GDC Game Developers Conference, and demonstrating the role and capabilities of ray tracing in game engines with Amazon, and with Perfect World and NetEase , Tencent, Unity, OPPO, VIVO and other game developers.
But even so, the application and popularization of ray tracing will still be a gradual process.
Stephen Barton emphasized, ” As an independent IP, the ray acceleration cluster can run independently without affecting the performance of the GPU itself, which is very important for mobile applications. “
“It is not necessary to create all the content with light-tracing technology starting today. We recommend that you add light-tracing elements to the existing game content bit by bit. From using ray tracing to create light and shadow effects, as the market Mobile devices are increasingly using hardware-level ray tracing technology, and further increasing the content of ray tracing.” Stephen Barton further said.
David Harold also pointed out, “From a content perspective, we are still far from the complete rollout of ray tracing applications.”
In other words, although mobile ray tracing still has a long way to go in terms of technology and ecology, it is a clear future trend and a highly anticipated technology.
According to ABI’s 2022 survey, mobile game users will grow from 2.6 billion in 2022 to 3.9 billion in 2030, and by 2026, 85% of gamers will prefer to play games on mobile phones.
The 2.6 billion mobile game users are one step closer to ray tracing. Ray tracing is a key factor to attract nearly 4 billion mobile game players in the future, and Imagination is the leader of this technology.
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