At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) today, Nvidia showcased a couple of new RTX-related demos. And while that"s not something new in 2021, the exciting bit about these was the fact that they were carried out on a system using an Arm-based processor.
The processor used here was MediaTek"s recently launched Kompanio 1200 (MT8195), an SoC designed for Chromebooks, and it was paired up with a GeForce RTX 3060 LHR graphics card. Together, the pair was able to power Bethesda"s Wolfenstein: Youngblood which was running with ray tracing on. Nvidia"s DLSS technology was also enabled in the demo that could potentially help with boosting framerates. Speaking of framerates, the fps achieved in the demo wasn"t provided by Nvidia but these are very early days and there"s probably a lot of optimization work left to be done.
The second demo was done using a sample scene called "The Bistro" where several ray-traced urban scenes in a French town were rendered containing more than 80,000 illuminated triangles.
You can watch these demos in the video below:
Nvidia says that these demos were made possible using the following SDKs:
Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), which uses AI to boost frame rates and generate beautiful, sharp images for games
RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), which lets developers add dynamic lighting to their gaming environments
NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD), a denoising library that’s designed to work with low ray per pixel signals
RTX Memory Utility (RTXMU), which optimizes the way applications use graphics memory
As far as what this means for the industry, here"s what Epic Games" Nick Penwarden has said:
NVIDIA extending RTX support to Arm and Linux has the potential to benefit games and industries such as automotive, where leading manufacturers use Unreal Engine not only for design visualization but also for digital cockpits and infotainment
We always welcome powerful features and SDKs that can be leveraged across many platforms.
You can read more about RTX on ARM in the official blog post here.