RAY TRACING
REIMAGINED
Our ray tracing brings true-to-life lighting, reflections and shadows to mobile, automotive, cloud and XR, without draining power or budget.
WHAT IS RAY TRACING?
Ray tracing is different.
Inspired by how light works in nature, ray tracing simulates the path of photons as they bounce around a scene—from the light source to the viewer’s eye. As light interacts with surfaces, it’s blocked, reflected, or refracted, even by off-screen objects. This creates realistic shadows, reflections and lighting effects.
The result? More life-like images and a simpler, more intuitive lighting process for developers and content creators.
RAY TRACING FOR THE MASSES
Available in single, dual, triple, and quad-RAC setups, DXT can be tailored to match the needs of a wide range of devices.
Compared to the previous generation, DXT delivers usable ray tracing with up to 40% less silicon area, helping reduce cost without compromising quality.
OUR UNIQUE APPROACH TO REAL-TIME RAY TRACING
Ray tracing is computationally intensive, which makes real-time performance a challenge, especially on mobile and edge devices. To overcome this, our architecture features patented, specialist hardware blocks that accelerate full ray tracing or enable an efficient hybrid rendering approach. This combines traditional rasterisation with ray tracing to deliver realistic lighting, reflections and shadow… at speed.
Our IMG DXT GPU IP introduced a flexible and scalable design tailored to meet the power and silicon area constraints of a broad range of markets. With configurations to suit everything from high-end platforms to more constrained designs, it brings real-time ray tracing within reach for more devices.
Thanks to its efficiency-focused features, IMG DXT maximises visual quality even at lower ray budgets, helping you achieve the ideal balance of performance and image fidelity.
A VISUAL REVOLUTION THAT SPANS KEY MARKETS
MOBILE
As ray tracing becomes standard on PCs and consoles, users will expect the same visual quality on their mobile devices. Imagination’s PowerVR GPU IP is already known for delivering console-quality graphics on portable hardware, and now, our mobile-first ray tracing extends that legacy into the next generation.
Designed with efficiency at its core, our ray tracing solution is ideal for battery-constrained mobile and XR devices. It enhances everything from mobile gaming to augmented and virtual reality apps, adding immersive realism through lifelike lighting and reflections.
AUTOMOTIVE
Displays are becoming central to the in-car experience, and premium brands are competing on visual quality. Ray tracing can elevate automotive graphics across infotainment, HUDs and safety-critical systems.
Technologies like surround-view, which rely on complex distortion correction, benefit greatly from ray tracing’s ability to render curved or warped projections in a single pass. This not only improves visual fidelity but also reduces latency, enhancing both safety and user experience.
CLOUD GAMING
Cloud gaming is reshaping how content is delivered, but managing heat and power at scale is a critical challenge for data centres. Imagination’s scalable ray tracing IP enables cloud platforms to deliver high-quality, ray-traced visuals while maintaining energy efficiency.
Our low-power architecture meets the performance demands of high-volume, high-fidelity cloud gaming environments, bringing cinematic realism to every stream, without overheating the infrastructure.
VISUALISATION
Industries such as architecture, property development, product design and interior design rely on highly accurate, photorealistic models. Traditionally, these take hours to render.
Imagination Ray Tracing makes real-time, physically based rendering possible, cutting time to market, improving collaboration, and delivering polished visual prototypes in moments rather than hours.
OUR PowerVR PHOTON ARCHITECTURE
Our PowerVR Photon architecture is the industry’s first Level 4 ray tracing solution, enabled by our custom-designed Ray Acceleration Cluster (RAC) hardware block. This scalable GPU component significantly boosts both performance and efficiency, delivering desktop-quality ray tracing to mobile devices and developers working on next-generation gaming and real-time applications.
LEVEL UP YOUR RAY TRACING
Understanding this is essential for power-sensitive markets like mobile, automotive, and edge AI, where real-time performance must be balanced with power and area constraints.
Want to know how Imagination’s GPU IP stands out? With unique innovations like our Coherency Engine and scalable Ray Acceleration Clusters, we’re delivering Level 4 ray tracing—optimiSed for next-gen, real-world applications.
RAY TRACING IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND
IMG DXT GPU IP
IMG DXT offers everything a customer might need in a GPU for them to integrate it into their next-generation game-ready mobile devices. Delivering even greater performance levels and power efficiency while bringing affordable and usable ray tracing into the mainstream.
IMG CXT GPU IP
A sweet spot core for premium mobile devices. CXT enables advanced effects like ray traced soft shadows, reflections and global illumination to create beautifully realistic game worlds. This was previously reserved for the highest level desktop GPUs.
PowerVR PHOTON
The most advanced ray tracing architecture in the world, enabling desktop-level ray tracing for mobile.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Ray tracing is a technique used in computer graphics to create highly realistic images by simulating the way that light interacts with objects in a scene. The process of ray tracing can be broken down into the following steps:
Casting rays: The first step in ray tracing is to cast rays from the camera through each pixel in the image plane and into the scene. These rays simulate the paths that light would take from the objects in the scene to the camera.
Intersecting with objects: As the rays travel through the scene, they may intersect with objects such as walls, floors, and other objects. When this happens, the ray is reflected, refracted, or absorbed by the object based on its material properties and the angle of incidence of the ray.
Calculating lighting: As the rays travel through the scene, they may also intersect with light sources such as lamps or the sun. When this happens, the colour and intensity of the light is calculated and added to the final colour of the pixel.
Combining colours: The colours of each pixel are calculated based on the materials the rays touch, the angles at which they touch them and the properties of the lights they finally intersect with.
Many modern video games use ray tracing to create highly realistic lighting and shadows. Ray tracing allows game developers to simulate the way that light interacts with objects in a scene, which can make virtual environments feel more immersive and lifelike.
Some examples of games that use ray tracing include:
- Cyberpunk 2077: This open-world action RPG from CD Projekt Red uses ray tracing to create highly realistic reflections, shadows, and global illumination.
- Control: This third-person action game from Remedy Entertainment uses ray tracing to create realistic reflections, shadows, and global illumination, as well as to simulate the way that light bounces off of surfaces.
- Minecraft: The popular sandbox game from Mojang uses ray tracing to create highly realistic lighting and shadows, as well as to add reflections and other visual effects.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: This first-person shooter from Infinity Ward uses ray tracing to create realistic shadows, ambient occlusion, and reflections.
- Battlefield V: This first-person shooter from DICE uses ray tracing to create realistic reflections, ambient occlusion, and global illumination.
Ray tracing can also be used to accelerate the game development pipeline. The technology makes it quick and easy for artists to visualise the impact of changing the location, brightness, size or colour of a light source.
Read more on why gamers and developers should care about Ray Tracing.
Rasterization is a technique where a scene is rendered by projecting 3D objects onto a 2D screen, and then filling in the pixels with colours based on the object’s surface properties and lighting conditions. Rasterization is an efficient technique and well-suited for real-time applications such as video games.
On the other hand, ray tracing is a technique that simulates the behaviour of light as it interacts with objects in a 3D scene. In ray tracing, rays are traced from the camera through the scene, and the colours of the pixels are determined based on the objects and lights with which the rays interact. Ray tracing produces highly realistic images with accurate lighting and shadows, but it is computationally intensive and requires either a lot of processing power or specialist hardware.
One key difference between rasterization and ray tracing is how they handle reflections and shadows. Rasterization often uses simplified techniques to simulate reflections and shadows, which can result in less realistic images. Ray tracing, on the other hand, simulates the behaviour of light in a more accurate way, which can lead to more realistic reflections and shadows.
Rasterization is a fast and efficient technique for rendering images in real-time, while ray tracing is a more computationally intensive technique that produces highly realistic images with accurate lighting and shadows. To find out more checkout our blog ray tracing vs rasterization
