Mobile real time ray tracing at no costs - PowerVR GR6500

http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr-developers/powervr-gr6500-ray-tracing

On top of the features listed above, PowerVR GR6500 includes additional ray tracing-specific hardware that provides full hardware acceleration of the entire ray tracing flow, including model building and traversal:

a dedicated ray tracing data master that feeds ray intersection data to the main scheduler, in preparation for shaders to run, which evaluate the ultimate data contribution from the ray.
a specialized Ray Tracing Unit (RTU) which uses fixed-function math to perform ray tracing intersection queries, in addition to gathering ray coherency in order to reduce power and bandwidth consumption.


More importantly, these blocks do not affect the shading performance of the traditional graphics pipeline because they do not use up shading GFLOPS to perform ray tracing-related tasks. Thus PowerVR GR6500 is able to perform ray tracing tasks 100x more efficiently compared to using GPU compute or other software-only approaches on traditional graphics architectures.

 

Sounds pretty awesome, had to happen sooner or later. Tho I'd prefer to see high-quality visuals on a big screen and not a mobile device (but of course more computers these days are using mobile GPU's, like in the iMacs). I wonder what kind of resolution it can do... 300 million rays suggests 5 million per frame at 60hz.. which suggests at least a couple of rays per pixel at 1080p. ... tho I wonder how antialiasing will work without lots of rays per pixel?

 

The figure quoted is rays, too, so you don't get complex paths traced at that resolution.

For AA I'd assume that the idea is to apply it in post. So perhaps the intent at this stage is that the tracing is done for things like shadows and reflections, and then AA is applied afterwards.

Also... the article says that this doesn't effect shader performance, but that alone doesn't make it "free". The "tracing master data" has to go somewhere, and it has to be accessed, and it has to be updated. I don't know much about the design of these things, so it could be that they're negligible. Still, even if there's non-negligible overhead for that it could still end up being far faster than doing equivalent effects in shaders, while getting better results.

 

Here is a newer article concerning the technology.

http://blog.imgtec.com/multimedia/award-winning-powervr-gr6500-ray-tracing-gpu-tapes-out

They have another showing it delivering reduced memory bandwidth and power consumption too.

http://blog.imgtec.com/multimedia/ray-traced-shadows-vs-cascaded-shadow-maps

 

Nooo! it's a mobile GPU, what about my PC?!

Mobile games will look and play better than console and PC titles with this technology.

That's just not fair, how do we get Imagination to build high power GPU versions of this for the PC?

 

I really doubt it.

 

I think it was sarcasm... maybe.

 

Still it would be nice to have dedicated (or bolt on to GPU) hardware assigned to this task in PC / MAC builds. Maybe one day we can skip the work around and go for the real deal..