Along with Arm’s Total Compute Solution launches for 2023 in the form of the Cortex-X4, A720, and A520, we’re also taking a look at Arm’s GPUs for next year, too. This model includes the new Immortalis G720, Mali G720 and Mali G620. These are the fifth generation Arm GPUs, and this is also the new naming convention for Arm GPUs. No more “Valhall” or “Bifrost”; It’s just the “fifth generation”.
Each of these GPUs are relatively straight increases over their predecessors, with the Immortalis G720 being Arm’s best GPU yet. As in the case of cores, GPUs here are particularly touted for improving their efficiency, though there are some big performance gains to be had as well. As Arm says, one-third of the power consumed by high-powered games comes from memory access, and memory bandwidth usage has been reduced by up to 40%.
With how good the Immortalis G715 was last year, it’s clear that Arm is already starting to become a formidable competitor when it comes to GPUs.
Distinguish between immortal and mali
Before we dive into Arm’s new GPUs, it’s important to distinguish the differences between Immortalis and Mali, especially since the lines are somewhat blurred to give common parts names. When I asked Arm, I was told that when OEMs equip their chipsets with Arm GPUs, the GPUs are marketed as Immortalis He should It has a ray tracing module, while the Mali G720 Can but not required to.
Moreover, the Mali G720 cluster can have between six and nine cores, while the Immortalis G720 can have up to 16 cores. As for the Mali G620, it’s limited to up to five cores, though it’s also a much more budget GPU.
Arm’s Immortalis G720 is its best GPU yet
The big revolution for Arm’s latest GPUs is Defified Vertex Shading, or DVS. Arm had already pioneered variable rate shading and ray tracing, and the next step was improvement in bandwidth and power consumption. As a result of these improvements, Arm is touting up to 15% higher performance per watt, along with an average 15% increase in peak performance.
In real-world performance, Arm measured up to a 20% performance improvement over the Immortalis G715, with much of that being attributed to the bandwidth savings from DVS. Because of the bandwidth savings, computer-level effects such as real-time dynamic lighting, blooming, depth of field, and ambient screen space closing can be added. In fact, the Unreal Engine 5 desktop renderer is coming to Android later this year as a result.
Delayed vertex shader is the “heading feature” of the G720, and allows the renderer to defer vertex shading until a portion (per tile) is shaded. The arrangement is still maintained in the polygon list, and the frame rate is increased (by 15% on average) compared to the G715, which means that the user can benefit from lower bandwidth usage thanks to a rendering pipeline that does not need to store intermediate vertex data in memory. Arm also assured me that this doesn’t affect framerates either, so you’ll have a consistent gaming experience. This is built into the GPU, so developers won’t need to do anything to integrate its use.
In turn, while Arm didn’t share any specific numbers, this will also benefit performance when using ray tracing. Given Arm’s leadership in this area already with Immortalis GPUs, this will likely widen the gap unless competitors make huge leaps. Arm also added a 2x MSAA unit, as earlier when a developer requested 2x MSAA from a GPU, it automatically jumped to 4x MSAA.
Other improvements have been made in the GPU as well, but it is smaller in size. The Command Stream (CSF) front-end has seen some improvements with additional work logs for stream processing, and other modules across the board have seen productivity improvements. CSF handles scheduling and pull calls with its own computational capabilities.
With the same power limitations as last year’s GPU, Arm says you’ll have a more powerful GPU, which scales down to an equally more power efficient GPU.
As with cores, GPU efficiency is a big issue
Arm seems to be very efficient this year, and with their GPUs, they’re exactly the same. That’s not to say that better performance isn’t a goal, obviously (and to some extent the company is still playing catch-up), but efficiency is important to most people. While the potential for performance gains is quite significant this time around, most people will likely be hoping for an overall improvement in battery life.
Having said that, those 40% bandwidth improvements are nothing to underestimate, and the 15% improvement in average frame rate is nothing to scoff at. We’ll be excited to see what chipsets might include this GPU in the future, and how it compares to upcoming GPUs in chips like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 later this year.
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