GPUs may be running out due to an ongoing global chip shortage, but Nvidia hasn’t broken the innovation break. Technology giants recently launched the new RTX3050 and RTX3050Ti GPUs for Intel and AMD laptops. And today, Nvidia announced a major leap forward to support another popular CPU architecture, ARM.
Yeah, you read that right. For the first time, Nvidia has demonstrated RTX support on an ARM-based platform. To accomplish this feat, Nvidia paired an ARM-based MediaTek Kompanio 1200 CPU (used with Chromebooks) with a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU. The demo demonstrated real-time ray tracing and DLSS on Wolfstein: Youngblood and The Bistro on the ARM platform.
So, for those wondering, how did the ARM processor for Chromebooks enable ray tracing and DLSS support? Now, in an official blog post, Nvidia states that it has ported some of the RTX SDKs to the ARM platform. Three of them, RTXDI, NRD, and RTXMU, are ready to use, but support for two more SDKs (RTXGI and DLSS) will arrive shortly. All of these SDKs and what they do can be explained here.
- RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI): Developers can add dynamic lighting to their games.
- Nvidia Optix AI-Accelerator Denoiser (NRD): This SDK uses AI to render high fidelity images faster on ARM devices.
- RTX Memory Utility (RTXMU): Optimizes how applications use graphics memory to make game execution smoother.
- RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI): Helps to reproduce how light bounces in a real environment.
- Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS): Use AI to increase the frame rate and produce beautiful and crisp images for games.
Nvidia extends RTX support, advanced graphics and ray tracing, to ARM CPUs to give gamers even more choice. ARM devices with Nvidia RTX graphics cards have the potential to offer casual gamers the best of both worlds. This is a more power efficient laptop that supports fidelity graphics.
