Wizard cores enable more immersive games and apps with real-life dynamic lighting models that enable advanced lighting effects, dynamic soft shadows, and life-like reflections and transparencies, previously unachievable in a mobile form factor. PowerVR Wizard Ray Tracing IP is highly scalable, making it disruptive to many other markets beyond mobile.

The new PowerVR Wizard graphics architecture is a significant addition to the lineup of market-leading PowerVR graphics processors (GPUs), which are already present in over half of the world’s smartphones and tablets.

The Wizard architecture is a ray tracing-enabled version of the PowerVR Series6XT Rogue architecture which adds significant new features to the pipeline, enabling accurate real time modelling of fully dynamic lights and shadows. Everything developers know and love about the PowerVR Rogue architecture is present in Wizard GPUs, enabling them to start to use ray tracing without extensive new learning.

PowerVR GR6500 is the first member of the new Wizard family of cores designed to bring real-time, interactive ray traced graphics to a broad range of consumer and mobile platforms, as well as gaming consoles and mainstream gaming PCs, workstations and servers.

Hossein Yassaie, president and CEO of Imagination, says: “Imagination’s highly-efficient PowerVR GPUs have played a key role in driving the creation of entirely new categories of mobile devices. Now we are changing the game again by bringing the next level of realism to mobile and consumer devices. Our ray tracing IP is here, and it’s ready for our licensees and developers to begin creating a new wave of immersive and exciting PowerVR-based consumer experiences.”

Enabling ray tracing capability in consumer devices required a fundamental breakthrough in the algorithms used within ray tracing, as well as the careful addition of optimized fixed function blocks in the GPU to allow ray tracing operations to be performed within the power consumption and bandwidth budgets available in today’s mainstream consumer devices.

With Imagination’s Wizard Ray Tracing family, patented custom hardware engines ensure the GPU’s processor clusters are kept free to run sophisticated shaders, producing stunning results with minimal developer effort. The unique hardware ray tracing processors, including coherence gathering engines, fixed function intersection testing array and accelerated scene hierarchy generator, receive rays from the shaders, determines their intersection and initiates more shaders.

All of this is made possible with entirely dynamic scenes through the addition of a novel hardware pipeline to build scene hierarchies required for ray tracing in parallel with other operations, all while remaining compatible with existing programmable vertex operations.

With all of these additions, Wizard cores address the real-world use cases of ray tracing with fully interactive dynamic content and photorealistic lighting. The net effect is an architecture that can perform ray tracing operations around 100 times as efficiently as performing the same operation using GPGPU functionality.

Through the advanced architecture of PowerVR Wizard, multiple ray tracing engines and shaders operate concurrently to ensure real world sustained performance for both ray tracing and shading.

Further cores will follow that offer smaller power and area footprints for more constrained environments, along with scaled up cores to deliver fully ray traced content for the ultimate in cinema quality graphics. All Wizard cores are designed to provide leading support for a range of APIs such as OpenGL ES 3.x, OpenGL 3.x, Direct3D 11 Level 10_0, OpenCL 1.x, and OpenRL 1.x.

Features:

－ Ray tracing: 300 MRPS (million rays per second) and 100 MDTPS (million dynamic triangles per second) at 600 MHz

－ Shading: Four Unified Shading Clusters (USCs), with 128 ALU cores delivering in excess of 150 GFLOPS (FP32) or 300 GFLOPS (FP16) at 600 MHz

－ PowerGearing G6XT for advanced power management and dynamic resource allocation

－ PVR3C triple compression technologies (PVRTC and ASTC for texture compression, PVRIC for frame buffer compression, PVRGC for geometry compression)

－ Deep Color support for very high image quality at Ultra HD resolutions and beyond