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Imagination’s IMG DXT: A Scalable Mobile GPU IP Design for Ray Tracing

IMG DXT is Imagination’s scalable, Photon-based GPU IP for mobile ray tracing—not a retail GPU or proof of a shipping phone. Here’s how its configurations and features fit the mobile power budget.
Length6 min Posted Quest giverVGSources Team
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Imagination Technologies announced IMG DXT on January 11, 2023, as the first GPU in its D-Series family. It is licensable GPU intellectual property for chipmakers—not a graphics card or a phone consumers can buy. DXT combines hardware-accelerated ray tracing with configurations intended to scale from mainstream to premium mobile devices, but the announcement alone did not establish that a DXT-powered phone or shipping SoC was available.

What Imagination announced

IMG DXT is a mobile-focused GPU design based on Imagination’s Photon ray-tracing architecture. The company positioned the D-Series for integration into mobile system-on-chips (SoCs), with different implementations intended to suit different silicon budgets and performance targets. Imagination said DXT had been licensed in multiple segments at launch, but did not identify a publicly shipping DXT-powered phone or SoC in the announcement. Imagination’s launch announcement and its DXT product page describe the design and licensing model.

That distinction matters to players: DXT is a technology a chipmaker can license and integrate. A game also needs suitable drivers, engine support, and an implementation of ray-traced effects before a player can use those capabilities.

Why ray tracing is difficult on a phone

Ray tracing can produce more convincing reflections, shadows, lighting, and occlusion, but it is not an automatic visual upgrade. The result depends on which effects a game implements, its resolution and frame-rate targets, the number of rays, denoising quality, and the scene’s materials and lighting. Many practical designs combine ray tracing with conventional rasterization rather than tracing every part of a scene.

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Phones also have a shared power and thermal budget. The GPU competes with the CPU, display, modem, and other SoC components; sustained gameplay can heat a device and reduce its operating clocks. Ray tracing, denoising, high-resolution textures, and post-processing can also put pressure on memory bandwidth. Imagination’s PowerVR optimization guidance emphasizes managing workload and power on these graphics cores. Peak specifications alone cannot show how a particular phone will perform over a long gaming session.

How DXT scales across device classes

DXT’s ray-acceleration cluster (RAC) can be configured at half size or as single-, dual-, triple-, and quad-RAC designs. In principle, an SoC designer can choose among these configurations based on device class, silicon area, power envelope, and target workload. A smaller design might reserve ray tracing for selected effects, while a larger design could target a broader set of effects.

This is scalability in the IP design, not proof that every configuration reached the market. Imagination lists products including the DXT-8-256 for mainstream mobile use, the DXT-48-1536 for premium designs, and the DXT-72-2304 as a flagship configuration. Product listings show what the company offers as IP; they do not by themselves identify a retail device using it.

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What the headline technologies do

Photon ray tracing

Imagination describes Photon as its mobile-optimized ray-tracing architecture and places it at Level 4 in the company’s own Ray Tracing Levels System. That is Imagination’s positioning, not an industry-wide ranking or independent certification. The company also claims up to 40% lower ray-tracing area cost than an equivalent CXT configuration. Area cost is not the same as 40% lower device power, nor does it imply 40% more game performance. Imagination’s DXT overview sets out these claims.

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Fragment Shading Rate (FSR)

In the DXT announcement, FSR means Fragment Shading Rate, not AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution. Fragment Shading Rate can reduce how many fragment-shader executions are performed while aiming to preserve most perceived image quality, potentially freeing workload and bandwidth for other effects.

Imagination gives a 4×4 fragment-region example and describes it as close to a 94% reduction in fragment workload. That figure applies to the stated shading-rate mode; it is not a 94% frame-rate increase or a promise of visually lossless results in every game. Aggressive rates can harm details such as thin geometry, text, foliage, or specular highlights, so developers need to test image quality in context. The launch announcement explains the example.

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2D dual-rate texturing

DXT includes a texture-processing path for filtering and post-processing workloads. Imagination says it can nearly double bilinear filtering throughput with minimal area growth. That may help suitable tasks such as post-processing, denoising, and computational photography, but it does not double overall GPU performance; the benefit depends on how much of an application uses the supported path.

Other announced features

Imagination’s materials also list triple-USC shader design, pipelined data masters, and a RISC-V firmware processor. The product pages specify ASTC HDR support and PVRIC5 framebuffer compression, alongside formats including PVRTC, ETC, and ASTC. These are components of the design and its supported graphics stack, not evidence of a particular game’s performance.

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Specifications—and why the FP32 figures differ

Item Announced or listed information
Announcement January 11, 2023; first GPU in the D-Series
Ray-tracing design Photon architecture; half-RAC, single-, dual-, triple-, and quad-RAC configurations
APIs listed on product pages Vulkan 1.3 with ray tracing, OpenGL ES, OpenCL 3.0, and Android NN HAL
Compression and texture formats PVRIC5, PVRTC, ETC, and ASTC, including ASTC HDR support
Flagship configuration IMG DXT-72-2304; listed at 72 GTexels/s
FP32 performance Imagination’s announcement quotes 2.5 TFLOPS at 1 GHz; its product page lists 2,304 FP32 operations per clock, or about 2.304 TFLOPS at 1 GHz; GamesBeat reported 2.25 TFLOPS
Generational claims Imagination claims 50% more top-end compute and texture performance per SPU than the previous generation, and 20% better performance density per area than IMG CXT

The different FP32 figures should not be treated as an independently verified benchmark or silently collapsed into one value. Imagination’s press release quotes roughly 2.5 TFLOPS for the flagship 1-GHz configuration; the current DXT-72-2304 product page lists 2,304 FP32 operations per clock, which works out to about 2.304 TFLOPS at 1 GHz. GamesBeat’s launch report gives 2.25 TFLOPS. These are published specification figures, not measurements of a shipping phone.

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What developers and chipmakers still have to do

An IP block’s listed API support is only one part of getting a feature into a game. A driver must expose the functionality on a finished device, the operating system and implementation must support it, and a game engine needs appropriate integration and content. Imagination’s announcement cited Vulkan ray-tracing support, its PowerVR SDK and developer tools, and ASTC HDR support. Product pages list Vulkan 1.3 with Ray Query and Ray Pipeline, OpenGL ES, OpenCL 3.0, and Android NN HAL. None of those listings establishes that a specific phone exposes ray tracing to games or has passed a particular conformance test.

For developers, practical planning includes:

  • Providing rasterized or other non-ray-traced fallbacks for devices without compatible hardware or driver support.
  • Choosing selective effects—such as shadows or reflections—rather than assuming full path tracing is appropriate for a mobile workload.
  • Profiling ray traversal, denoising, post-processing, and memory use separately.
  • Testing Fragment Shading Rate for visible artifacts and tuning it by scene content.
  • Measuring sustained frame rates under realistic thermal conditions, not relying only on peak clocks or theoretical throughput.
  • Accounting for variation among RAC configurations, memory systems, drivers, and cooling designs.

For chipmakers, RAC count is only one choice. Memory bandwidth, thermal targets, driver maturity, game-engine integration, and the availability of content all affect whether the feature is useful in a finished product.

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Why Imagination emphasizes efficiency

PowerVR GPUs use Tile-Based Deferred Rendering: the scene is divided into tiles, visibility work is performed, and tile data can remain in fast on-chip memory. Imagination presents this approach as a way to reduce overdraw and system-memory traffic—important concerns for battery-powered devices. Its architecture guide explains the tile-based model. This context helps explain the company’s focus on area, bandwidth, and workload efficiency, but it does not establish that DXT outperforms every competing mobile GPU.

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What the 2023 announcement does—and does not—show

The announcement establishes that Imagination introduced DXT as licensable GPU IP, described a range of ray-tracing configurations, and made specific architectural and performance claims. Imagination also cited OPPO and collaboration through the O3DF Mobile Device Working Group, evidence of ecosystem engagement rather than confirmation of a DXT-based OPPO handset.

The supplied public product and launch information does not identify a shipping DXT-powered smartphone or SoC, provide independent handset benchmarks, or demonstrate measured battery gains and real-world ray-traced frame rates. That leaves the consumer impact contingent on licensees integrating the design, shipping drivers that expose its features, and games supporting them.

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.

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