GPU’s latest incarnation traces rays in real-time

High-res, high-performance 3D graphics pervades our user experiences these days, and Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR GPU architecture has been a major factor in bringing this performance level to portable devices such as Apple's iPhones and iPads. Now, the team responsible for the GPU's latest incarnation, the PowerVR Wizard, has taken the 2015 ACE Award for Design Team of the Year, presented by EDN and EE Times.

The Wizard adds ray tracing to the PowerVR family. Ray tracing is arguably the ne plus ultra of graphics rendering methods, but due to its computational requirements, is by no means common in real-time settings. Imagination wants to change that, by bringing ray tracing to mobile devices no less. In Imagination's words:

PowerVR Wizard Ray Tracing graphics IP processors enable more immersive games and apps with real-life dynamic lighting models that produce advanced lighting effects, dynamic soft shadows, and life-like reflections and transparencies, previously unachievable in a mobile form factor.

The PowerVR Wizard distills 8 years of experience by a global team of designers, many hailing from Caustic Graphics, which Imagination acquired in 2010.

One of the biggest challenges of a real-time ray tracer design is the memory bandwidth required, and solving it was perhaps the design team's key to success. They developed a scheduling and sorting algorithm that combines large numbers of simultaneous reads into a “spatial database.”

The performance numbers claimed include: 300 MRPS (million rays per second), 100 MDTPS (million dynamic triangles per second), and four unified shading clusters, with 128 ALU cores delivering in excess of 150 GFLOPS (FP32) or 300 GFLOPS (FP16), all at 600 MHz. Support is provided for numerous APIs, such as OpenGL ES, OpenGL, Direct3D, OpenCL, and OpenRL.

Here's an early Imagination Tech video demonstrating ray tracing:

Highlighting the many people, teams, and disciplines needed to pull off a design of this magnitude, Imagination Technologies had this to say:

There are many people whose involvement in the project started many years ago, including teams led by Imagination’s Steve Clohset, Luke Peterson, Joe Richards, Rudy Tan, John Howson, and Steve MacKenzie. Since those early beginnings, the Wizard project has become an amazing effort encompassing work from all across the company, including the Hardware teams, Csim team, Driver team, Compiler team, Services team, Research team, Test Gen team, Architecture team, Demo Team, DevTech Team, PR team, and many more individuals.

While the approach may be a risky one, Imagination's director of ray-tracing research, Luke Peterson, had this to say about the project's beginnings:

We were outsiders when we started this project. The experts were focusing on a particular set of problems. We knew nothing of the state-of-the-art research, and it allowed us to challenge assumptions that the rest of the industry took for granted. Often that was a mistake and we reinvented a lot of wheels, but occasionally it cleared the way for some major breakthroughs.

It sounds like the risk paid off. Look forward to some stunning games, design and modeling apps, and who knows what else, on a mobile device near you, soon.

Also see :

• Imagination adds small core to ‘Rogue’ GPU range
• Imagination reveals first Series 6 GPU cores
• Optimizing high-performance CPUs, GPUs and DSPs? Use logic and memory IP
• Apple, Intel up stakes in Imagination Technologies
  

The ACE Awards were presented during the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley on July 21, 2015. The full list of winners can be found here.