Stefan Mileschin

Taking place this week in San Francisco is 2014 Game Developers Conference. Though not necessarily a hardware show, in years past we have seen gaming-related product announcements in both the desktop space and the mobile space. This year is no exception, and in the mobile space in particular it looks to be a very busy year. As we saw on Monday, Khronos is at the show announcing OpenGL ES 3.1, with more announcements to come in the days that follow.

But it’s Imagination Technologies that may end up taking the spotlight for the most groundbreaking announcement. Never a stranger to GDC, Imagination is at GDC 2014 to announce their new family of GPU designs. Dubbed “Wizard”, Imagination is introducing a family of GPUs unlike anything we’ve seen before.

To get right to the point then, what is Wizard? In short, Wizard is Imagination’s long expected push for ray tracing in the consumer GPU space. Ray tracing itself is not new to the world of GPUs – it can be implemented somewhat inefficiently in shaders today – but with Wizard, Imagination intends to take it one step further. To that end Imagination has been working on the subject of ray tracing since 2010, including actions such as founding the OpenRL API and releasing dedicated ray tracing cards, and now they are ready to take the next step by introducing dedicated ray tracing hardware into their consumer GPU designs.

The end result of that effort is the Wizard family of GPUs. Wizard is essentially an extension of Imagination’s existing PowerVR Series6XT Rogue designs, taking the base hardware and adding the additional blocks necessary to do ray tracing. The end result being a GPU that is meant to be every bit as capable as Rogue in traditional rasterization rendering, but also possessing the ability to do ray tracing on top of that.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7870/i...ns-ray-tracing