Imagination demos real-time ray tracing on PowerVR GPU

[HEXUS]

5x faster than a GTX 980 Ti while consuming 10x less power, claims Alex Voica.

Watch the show..

[scaryjim]

in certain ray-tracing workloads

And that's the gotcha right there. Anyone can cherry pick a benchmark that shows off their product's particular strength; it doesn't mean you can extrapolate that performance to any other workload. Let's not forget that the 980 Ti is actually relatively weak at ray-tracing: it loses out to the 290X by some distance in Luxmark...

It's already taken Imagination 2 years to go from announcement to a "working sample". Will we see a shipping product with the specs of that working sample? I can't see them pushing their way into the desktop add-in card market, but a product pulling "10x less power" than a 980 Ti (sloppy language, but I'm going to assume that means 1/10th) is still looking at a 25W TDP: that's not going in MY smartphone, I'll tell you that for nothing

[Deders]

But can it ray trace Crysis?

[meuvoy]

I see Imagination will be the next Nvidia Acquisition...

[Firedrops]

Maybe we'll see a day where instead of just a GPU, we can have dedicated shaders, texture fillers, ray tracers, etc cards.

[Nifl]

My printer is also 5 times faster than my toaster at coloring paper, while consuming 10 times less energy.

[Froggywoggy]

I'm sure this will be great for corporate use, e.g. showing off a new model to a client. I also imagine that if it is really as good as they say it is, AMD or Nvidia (probably the latter) will gobble them up.

[deejayburnout]

Ray Tracing.

I might have went to school with him.

[Xlucine]

What do they use in ray tracing render farms for cgi movies and such? A custom piece of silicon for those customers ought to have a decent market