As part of the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Nvidia demonstrated various RTX features on a combination of the latest GeForce graphics card and ARM processor for the first time. Wolfenstein: Youngblood with real-time ray tracing reflections and DLSS as well as a demo by The Bistro with ray tracing were shown.
The announcement from Nvidia sounds a bit misleading at first, because this one is there was talk of “ray tracing and DLSS on ARM for the first time”. This statement is not fundamentally wrong, but ray tracing and DLSS were still carried out on a current GeForce graphics card, more precisely a GeForce RTX 3060.
ARM-CPU meets RTX 3060
It is correct, however, that the graphics card was used in a system with an ARM CPU. For the demo, the GPU was paired with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200. Kompanio are MediaTek's ARM processors for Chromebooks, which in the case of the Kompanio 1200 have similarities to the Dimensity 1200 for smartphones. The four Cortex-A78 cores, however, have a lower clock rate and the Mali GPU is smaller. In any case, the GeForce RTX 3060 takes its place in the demos shown.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood does not come for ARM
With this platform, Nvidia presented Wolfenstein: Youngblood by Bethesda Softworks and MachineGames including ray tracing reflections and DLSS as well as the demo The Bistro of the Open Research Content Archive with ray tracing. An ARM version of Wolfenstein: Youngblood is not to be expected, however. In the video, Nvidia explains that only the flexibility of the id Tech Engine should be demonstrated.
RTX SDK extended by ARM
The implementation made possible the transfer of five RTX technologies into the RTX SDK for arm. These include DLSS, RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI), Nvidia Optix AI-Acceleration Denoiser (NRD) and the RTX Memory Utility (RTXMU), which is intended to optimize the use of graphics memory. RTXGI in particular will soon come for ARM, but the feature is already available for Linux.