NVIDIA Demonstrates RTX Ray-Tracing And DLSS Using MediaTek Kompanio 1200

Back in 2020, NVIDIA acquired ARM, a CPU architecture mainly used on smartphones and tablets. We did expect the brand will deeply integrate with ARM to improve the accessibility of the NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA has now, for the first time, successfully demonstrated real-time ray-tracing and DLSS on an ARM CPU from MediaTek.

The company has tested some of the latest AAA titles like Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Bistro, where, it has successfully tested real-time ray-tracing techniques like RTX reflection and direct illumination. NVIDIA has also tested DLSS, an unscaling technology that doesn't compromise with the graphics quality.

Test Bench Information

The company confirmed that it has demoed the real-time ray-tracing and DSLL techniques on a test bench with the MediaTek Kompanio 1200, which is currently the most powerful processor from MediaTek. The CPU was paired with the RTX 3060, which is one of the most affordable graphics cards with native raytracing support.

To achieve this feat, NVIDIA has ported several RTX SDKs such as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), NVIDIA Optix AI-Acceleration Denoiser (NRD), RTX Memory Utility (RTXMU), and RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI) to ARM architecture.

Some of these ported SDKs are already available for devices with ARM-based Linux and Chromium platforms. This means we can expect to see Chromebooks with real-time ray-tracing capability in the near future. This means we could see much thinner and lighter laptops with ray-tracing capability.

Is It Helpful To Consumers?

Apple went all-ARM with the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro. The company is also in the procession to replace Intel CPUs with ARM CPUs on the remaining Mac products. Given the efficiency and performance capability of the ARM architecture, many PC OEMs are likely to take this route in the coming days.

By the time ARM gets mainstream on the laptops and notebooks platform, NVIDIA will be ready with the graphics offering. This means, NVIDIA will have graphics offering for laptops of various platforms, which should help the company to continue its market dominance.

Probably in the next few years, we can also expect to see NVIDIA GPUs even on smartphones, as every smartphone does use an ARM CPU, and brands like Samsung are already partnering with AMD to improve graphics performance.