Nvidia Demonstrates RTX and DLSS on Laptop with Arm CPU and RTX 3060 GPU
Nvidia shows at the Game Developer Conference that it has gotten RTX ray tracing and upscale technology DLSS working on a laptop with an Arm processor. It is a chip from MediaTek, which is assisted by a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU.
The game shown is Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Nvidia has teamed up with developer MachineGames and publisher Bethesda to get the game running with RTX and DLSS on an Arm laptop. It is purely a demo; there are no plans for a commercial release of a modified version of that game for Arm PCs.
According to Nvidia , this game was chosen to showcase the operation of RTX and DLSS on an Arm PC because of the flexibility of the idTech engine the game runs on. Nvidia doesn’t give details about performance; the demonstration is purely intended to show the effect of the techniques on Arm.
Nvidia has ported several RTX SDKs to run them on Arm hardware with Linux and Chromium. These include DLSS, RTX Direct Illumination, Nvidia Optix AI-Acceleration Denoiser, RTX Memory Utility, and RTX Global Illumination.
The Rtxdi, NRD, and Rtxmu SDKs for Arm with Linux and Chromium are available to developers immediately. According to Nvidia, Rtxgi and DLSS will follow shortly. Developers can use it to release games and software for Arm hardware using the aforementioned techniques. However, an RTX video card is required to use it. There are currently no Arm devices with such GPUs for sale.
For the demos, Nvidia uses a laptop with a MediaTek Kompanio processor. Those socs were announced last year as chips for Chromebooks . The MT8195 is used in the demonstration. That is a 6nm Arm processor for laptops with four Arm Cortex-A78 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores.
Nvidia benefits from getting its techniques working on Arm hardware. The video card manufacturer wants to buy Arm itself for $ 40 billion . There is a lot of criticism of those takeover plans, because of the power that Nvidia would get. Many companies license Arm to make their own processors. The acquisition is still under investigation by the United Kingdom and the EU.