Imagination launches next-gen mobile gaming at GDC 2022

London, England – 23^rd March 2022 – Imagination Technologies reveals its next generation of mobile gaming graphics at GDC 2022. Using the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), Imagination runs hardware-accelerated global illumination ray tracing solutions, available for future retail devices. Reaching a significant milestone in creating an open ecosystem for developers, Imagination’s PowerVR Open Source GPU driver has been accepted into the Mesa 3D Graphics Library, starting the process for upstream Kernel contributions.

Imagination has also announced its collaboration with King to help drive innovation for developers in the mobile gaming industry through joint R&D.

Chris Porthouse, Chief Product Officer, Imagination, says: “Our two-decade journey set us on a path to revolutionise mobile gaming graphics. Today we’ve reached a true milestone in gaming performance, with a first of its kind hardware-accelerated mobile ray tracing solution. The recently announced IMG CXT GPU offers OEMs the possibility of unlocking RTLS Level 4 ray tracing capabilities, enabling more processes to be performed on hardware for greater efficiency.”

Royal O’Brien, General Manager of Digital Media and Games, Open 3D Foundation says: “Working with companies such as Imagination helps drive the delivery of next-generation graphics capabilities to developers to shape the future of mobile gaming. Mobile GPU solutions often compromise performance in favour of maintaining power efficiency. However, our collaboration with Imagination has enabled us to navigate these constraints efficiently while also unlocking innovative hardware-accelerated ray tracing on the open-source Open 3D Engine. We look forward to continuing our great work together.”

Pierre Gufler, Senior Studio Technical Director, King, says: “Having developed chart-topping gaming titles for mobile across the years, we’ve established a keen understanding of what creates unique experiences for our players. A key mission when designing our games is to offer players an immersive and fun visual experience. We have been working with Imagination to give our developers more tools to create unique graphical gaming experiences for users across the world.”

Ray tracing can be performed with varying levels of performance and efficiency and to highlight this Imagination established the Ray Tracing Levels System (RTLS), identifying six levels of ray tracing, from Level 0 to Level 5. The Photon architecture inside IMG CXT sits at Level 4 of the RTLS, making it the most advanced solution currently available, enhancing ray tracing performance and efficiency to deliver a desktop-quality experience for mobile gamers and developers.

Chris Porthouse, Chief Product Officer, Imagination, says: “As a part of our goal to bring efficient and innovative mobile ray-tracing capabilities to our developers, we have partnered with AWS to showcase our global illumination ray-tracing demonstration via the Open 3D Engine (O3DE). Built around the future of retail hardware, the demo will be premiered live during our sponsored session at GDC 2022.”

Imagination’s ray tracing solution demo running on O3DE.