In addition to new CPU cores, ARM also introduced new and improved GPUs for future chipsets. They cover three segments: the flagship market will be served by the Immortalis-G925, the premium segment is getting the Mali-G725, while entry-level phones and smartwatches will use the Mali-G625.
Immortalis is ARM’s ray tracing focused GPU and this is its third iteration. And even if you don’t care about ray tracing, the G925 brings exciting improvements to peak performance and efficiency.
Compared to the Immortalis-G720, the G925 can render games at 37% higher frame rate. Alternatively, smartphone makers can optimize for efficiency – when both GPUs target the same performance level, the G925 uses 30% less energy.
ARM even offers concrete numbers for specific games. Genshin Impact sees a 49% boost when testing with the new GPU, Roblox is up 46%. The company also tested other popular games – Call of Duty Mobile, Diablo Immortal, Day After Tomorrow, Fortnite and PUBG Mobile – and reports performance improvements in the range of 29% to 72%.
However, these games are not a fixed target. Over the years, developers have introduced more complex models with more geometry – Fortnite and Genshin Impact see a 9%-11% increase in geometry complexity year over year, for example.
Graphical effects are becoming more complex and demanding too, so fragment shaders are seeing increasing render times (27% to 43% more year on year). Fragment shaders calculate the color of each pixel by fetching textures and applying lighting and effects.
Games that use ray tracing will benefit from the Immortalis-G925 too. Scenes with intricate objects can be rendered up to 52% faster. Game devs can also choose between graphics quality and performance – the G925 is 27% faster when rendering ray traced transparencies with the same fidelity as the G720, but if devs opt for slightly reduced quality, the GPU performance will increase by up to 52% while memory traffic will go down by 57%.
Improvements in efficiency and performance are great, but sometimes there’s no substitute for brute force. To that end, ARM has increased the maximum core count from 16 on the G720 to 24 cores on the Immortalis-G925. That said, the G925 can be configured with fewer cores – the minimum is 10.
Core count is what separates the Mali-G725 (6-9 cores) and Mali-G625 (1-5 cores). And, of course, ray tracing is exclusive to the Immortalis line.
While there is still plenty of buzz around ray tracing, AI is the major trend right now and you’re most likely to encounter it on mobile. Chipsets usually have dedicated NPUs, but the workload is often spread between CPU, GPU and NPU.
The Immortalis-G925 is 30% faster at upscaling images using neural networks than the G720. Other image processing tasks like segmentation and classification (i.e. picking out different objects from a scene and figuring out what they are) see a boost of 41%. The GPU can be used for language processing and speech-to-text tasks too where it beats its predecessor by 50%.
It’s not just the hardware, ARM is focusing on software as well. It is working with Epic Games to bring its Unreal Engine 5 desktop renderer to Android. This includes optimizing the ray tracing Lumen lighting technology for ARM GPUs. The company is also working with Google and MediaTek to improve the Android Dynamic Performance Framework, which allows developers to tune performance in real time based on the chipset’s temperature.