Arm's Immortalis GPU is Its First With Hardware Ray Tracing for Android Gaming (theverge.com) 65
Arm is announcing its new flagship Immortalis GPU today, its first to include hardware-based ray tracing on mobile. As PCs and the latest Xbox Series X and PS5 consoles are all gradually moving toward impressive ray-traced visuals, Immortalis-G715 is designed to be the Arm's first GPU to deliver the same on Android phones and tablets. From a report: Built on top of Mali, a GPU that's used by the likes of MediaTek and Samsung, Immortalis is designed with 10-16 cores in mind and promises a boost of 15 percent over the previous generation premium Mali GPUs. Arm sees Immortalis as the start of a transition to ray tracing on mobile following its success with the 8 billion Mali GPUs that have shipped to date.
"The challenge is that Ray Tracing techniques can use significant power, energy, and area across the mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC)," explains Andy Craigen, director of product management at Arm. "However, Ray Tracing on Immortalis-G715 only uses 4 percent of the shader core area, while delivering more than 300 percent performance improvements through the hardware acceleration."
It's not clear if a 3x speedup over software-based ray tracing will be enough to tempt game developers, but when Nvidia introduced hardware accelerated ray tracing in its RTX 2080, it advertised a 2x-3x boost at the time. "It's the right performance point for now to get this technology into the market," says Arm's Paul Williamson, adding that it may also come in handy in augmented reality applications where RT could be used to match virtual lighting to the real-world environment around you. Arm is already delivering software-based ray tracing in last year's Mali-G710, but the promise of hardware support means we will start to see flagship smartphones with this chip at the beginning of 2023. Samsung also announced its Exynos 2200 chip with hardware-based ray tracing earlier this year, so manufacturers are getting ready for the games to arrive.
"The challenge is that Ray Tracing techniques can use significant power, energy, and area across the mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC)," explains Andy Craigen, director of product management at Arm. "However, Ray Tracing on Immortalis-G715 only uses 4 percent of the shader core area, while delivering more than 300 percent performance improvements through the hardware acceleration."
It's not clear if a 3x speedup over software-based ray tracing will be enough to tempt game developers, but when Nvidia introduced hardware accelerated ray tracing in its RTX 2080, it advertised a 2x-3x boost at the time. "It's the right performance point for now to get this technology into the market," says Arm's Paul Williamson, adding that it may also come in handy in augmented reality applications where RT could be used to match virtual lighting to the real-world environment around you. Arm is already delivering software-based ray tracing in last year's Mali-G710, but the promise of hardware support means we will start to see flagship smartphones with this chip at the beginning of 2023. Samsung also announced its Exynos 2200 chip with hardware-based ray tracing earlier this year, so manufacturers are getting ready for the games to arrive.
Better lighting! (Score:3)
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Your language is crude but the message rings true.
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There just is no fairer way to describe that tripe.
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Which means developers won't be able to make significant use of it.
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Ain't that the truth. Remember the "out of season April Fool's joke that Blizzard was going to release a Diablo game on mobile? Yeah well it's the single worst rated game on Metacritic ever https://www.metacritic.com/gam... [metacritic.com]
I am lucky though. The game is banned in my country due the government having laws about predatory gambling practices in games. That's what the industry is now, taking our most beloved franchises and turning them into something so horrid that there are actual laws protecting consumers fro
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Probably not, but one needs to be careful to separate the term "review bomb" from "spam bots". Review bombs are very much airing legitimate grievances as to a company's actions, and while I have no doubt that the low metacritic score doesn't actually reflect directly the gameplay of Diablo Immortal, it does however reflect what people think of the idea of a lootbox / microtransaction filled cash grab.
Mind you Metacritic's professional review score is insanely low as well (around 50% is basically crippling g
Mali (Score:4, Insightful)
What's interesting about Mali is that there are working OSS drivers. Even the official driver is part-OSS [arm.com], but there is a full-OSS one that works pretty well and which is somewhat officially supported [cnx-software.com].
What about Immortalis?
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As irrelevant as actually open mobile operating systems. Nowadays, most people can't even root their device, much less install system drivers of their own on it. In part because bootloader is locked, and for the rest because they can't do critical things like banking on a rooted device without massive risks.
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These GPUs will be in "android sticks" and STBs and the like as well as telephones, so the availability of OSS drivers is relevant for some use cases.
It's no more risky to do banking on a rooted device than on your desktop.
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>It's no more risky to do banking on a rooted device than on your desktop.
You're clearly unaware of the fact that most banks nowadays specifically have it in their terms of service that you are not allowed to do that, and actively block rooted devices.
And unlike most TOS, those can actually stick and cause severe consequences.
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>It's no more risky to do banking on a rooted device than on your desktop.
You're clearly unaware of the fact that most banks nowadays specifically have it in their terms of service that you are not allowed to do that, and actively block rooted devices.
You're clearly unaware that this is completely irrelevant to my claim. Also, it's pretty easy to stealth root. It's often a checkbox.
And unlike most TOS, those can actually stick and cause severe consequences.
That stuff is in there specifically for the purpose of shielding themselves from liability. If they prohibit it then they don't have to cover you if you do it and then have a security problem. It makes good sense because many rooted devices are also running weird distributions with problems with selinux enforcing. They're not going to sue you or likely even terminate your acco
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That moment when in desperate need to be right, you walk the path going to the cliff half way, stop and say "look, this path isn't going all the way to the cliff!"
Walk it to the end. Do it. What does it mean for end user that bank gets to absolve itself of any responsibility for any fraud that occurs with any of the user's accounts?
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What does it mean for end user that bank gets to absolve itself of any responsibility for any fraud that occurs with any of the user's accounts?
That's not how it works, it's not what I said, and either you know it or you're way dumber than I thought.
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The real question is if they're coping for some kind of defect within themselves or their upbringing, or cognizant of the manipulation.
The first part is clear, only the part after the comma is in question.
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Read your bank's app's TOS. Almost all of them have the relevant clauses at this point, and those will actually almost certainly stick in court.
I've seen several precedents of them sticking in places like India already where rooted phones are far more prevalent.
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You mischaracterize their argument after throwing fallacious spaghetti bomb at the wall, after fallacious sphaghetti bomb at the wall, and then declare victory with a wave of your hands. Fucking fascinating. How much did your parents pay your teachers to get you through grade school?
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I was wondering when you are going to rush in and do your usual projection of your own faults on others. You didn't disappoint. Have another nice meltdown on me!
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That moment when in desperate need to be right, you walk the path going to the cliff half way, stop and say "look, this path isn't going all the way to the cliff!"
I was wondering when you are going to rush in and do your usual projection of your own faults on others. You didn't disappoint. Have another nice meltdown on me!
You crack me the fuck up, dude. The sad part, is I think drinky might be right, and you might be too fucking stupid to understand the irony.
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It's quite alright. I have done the clinical tests to determine my IQ, so that one insult hit with the same accuracy as the previous ones.
But I do understand that fools can entertain each other for eternity.
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It's quite alright. I have done the clinical tests to determine my IQ, so that one insult hit with the same accuracy as the previous ones.
LOL.
No, you haven't. Nobody with an IQ above 40, a benchmark that is notoriously difficult to measure (at some point, you're just better off counting pools of drool they leave on the puzzles), would refer to such a test as clinical unless they were trying to sell it.
How fucking pathetic does your life have to be to lie about such a thing?
But I do understand that fools can entertain each other for eternity.
Is that bit of dumbfuckery supposed to be insightful in your mind?
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Unfortunately, while I may be foolish enough to be entertained by a fool like yourself, I'm apparently not foolish enough to be entertained by you for eternity.
Huh. I learned something about myself today. Thanks.
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Is this how you get around every time you're wrong? Deflect, deflect, deflect?
I get the feeling your dad made you feel stupid as a kid. You're trying very hard to seem not so.
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You're clearly unaware of the fact that most banks nowadays specifically have it in their terms of service that you are not allowed to do that, and actively block rooted devices.
All wrong.
The bank can not even know if your device is rooted or not. You are so silly it is beyond believe.
And obviously my Macs are all "rooted".
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Yes, yes, also Germany controls wind and Sun, and there are no winters colder than -20C in Northern Europe because of global warming.
Why am I not surprised you're a mac user? :D
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and there are no winters colder than -20C in Northern Europe because of global warming.
Correct.
The last winter cold as such was 1973. Or? Do you have a counter example?
Yes, yes, also Germany controls wind and Sun,
No idea what you mean with that.
We do not do rain cloud seeding to increase sun, if you mean that.
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The bullshit is strong in this one.
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I would agree that it's bullshit that bootloader is locked on most modern phones, and that's it's bullshit that banks don't allow their apps to be used on rooted devices.
But that is reality today. Which means that those of us that live in that reality have to deal with it.
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The bullshit part is the implication that you can't get a phone with an unlocked boot loader.
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Me
>most modern phones
You
>can't get a phone
Ask a friend to read this thread for you and explain the difference.
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Fuck off with your disinformation. I have perfectly modern phones with unlockable boot loaders.
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I will simply re-iterate that you should ask a friend to explain to you the difference between the two concepts above, so you can understand just how idiotic the claim of "Fuck off with your disinformation. I have perfectly modern phones with unlockable boot loaders" is in the context of this thread.
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Put your head up your asshole and suck.
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A driver that functions as well as your arguments, until you sign an NDA.
The fully OSS Mali driver was good enough to play Quake on years ago, and that's one of the most important, influential, and entertaining games ever made, so thanks I guess?
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Wrong.
https://docs.mesa3d.org/driver... [mesa3d.org]
https://docs.mesa3d.org/driver... [mesa3d.org]
Now run along and lie somewhere else
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But you know what I said and tossed that red herring out anyway. XD
Now go lie somewhere else.
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Just make good games already! (Score:2)
I really don't know why we see so few good games for mobile. Phones are getting quite powerful, and we have support for gamepads as well which should offer a decent input device for a lot of games. But still we see almost no games that aren't just games designed to extract as much money as possible from people. If a game like Breath of the Wild can run on Switch and WiiU, there's no reason we shouldn't have good games for phones.
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I really don't know why we see so few good games for mobile.
Because people expect phone apps to cost five bucks or less. You can't sell most good games for that and make a profit unless they are loaded up with microtransactional horseshit.
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Google want microtransactions. They take 30% of each one of those. Selling a game once is only 1 cut.
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Google doesn't prohibit you from selling a mobile app for $50 with no microtransactions. It's the "buying" audience that has decided apps should cost practically nothing up front, so they will not buy your expensive title. After all why would they pay $50 for your game when they can get a different game for free and only pay anything if they like it enough to spend money on in-game transactions? It's a race to the bottom.
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Google doesn't care what you sell as long as they can get a piece of it.
And frankly they don't even care that much about getting a piece of every piece of software, as long as they get a piece of the bulk of it, because every popular piece of software increases the chance that someone will use their platform, and their app store.
Further, it really, really doesn't matter to Google whether you have microtransactions, or sell a sequel, or sell a DLC... no matter what you're going to sell it, and they will like
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Mobile is, by a substantial margin, the platform where you are most likely to have low-friction access to a mechanism for micro to small-ish transactions that is already hooked up to payment information and ready to go.
Consoles of recent generations are unlikely to be fully freestanding, given that paying for basic multiplayer features has become established as a console thin
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It didn't take long to work out never to download a free game and to have a very high barrier to download anything with in-game-purchasing. A $5 game is a better deal than a free game.
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I think it's about the intersection of technology and culture. Phones have powerful processors, but they're still not a very good gaming platform. Tiny screens to start with. And you're probably stuck with on-screen controls, which are terrible for many games (no tactile feedback, and your fingers block the screen making the tiny display even tinier). It's nothing like playing on a big monitor with a good controller.
That means most "serious gaming" is done on PC or consoles. And "serious gamers" are a
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The Switch Lite has a smaller screen size (5.5 inches) than many phones that are out there.
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Sure, there must be lots of people who would love to carry around a controller and pay $50 so they can play a game on a tiny screen.
Mobile games are designed for people to waste time while they're standing in a checkout line or waiting for someone else to stand in a checkout line. Mobile developers discovered that casual time wasting and the psychology of gambling go marvellously together.
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Why rely on one time payment, when you can have Whale Wars a la Diablo Immortal?
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Battery life. It is that simple. You can't sit and play a mobile game using say the unity engine for more than an hour or two without draining the battery from 100 to 0%. The platform is just too inconvenient.
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No, but you could play the same game on your Shield or whatever at home, and on your phone while you're out.
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Second, an AAA game back in the late 2000s took up 10-50Gb ... not even to talk about 50Gb.
A blue ray does not hold 10 Gb
Second, an AAA game back in the late 2000s took up 10-50Gb
That is complete nonsense.
Oh, it seems I'm repeating myself ...
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I've been solely playing on mobile for a decade now and I'm totally fine with mobile games, because I no longer have tens of hours to spend on gaming so occasional 15-minutes is perfect for my needs. And yes, micro-transaction games are the norm but it doesn't mean they're not good or look bad, quite the contrary.
I guess it really depends what type of player you are. I wouldn't want to play Warcraft or FPS on mobile. Puzzle games, building games (e.g. SimCity) or even racing simulations (RR3) can work grea
3x faster? That makes it fast enough (Score:2)
To be in the next Mario game.
Feeling old (Score:1)