NVIDIA RTX graphics Chromebooks are not a distant dream anymore. At the ongoing GDC 2021 event, NVIDIA showcased demos of a few Chromebooks that were running on a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 platform paired with an RTX 3060. These demos go on to show that the upcoming ARM-powered laptops may come with ray tracing and AI upscaling capabilities. The demos included Wolfenstein: Youngblood and The Bistro. The Wolfenstein was paired with real-time ray tracing and deep learning super sampling, while on the other hand, the Bistro came with ray tracing and AI denoising.
NVIDIA announced that the device was paired with a MediaTek Kompanio 1200 (MT8195) SoC coupled with a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU for the demo. The company has already migrated several devices running on RTC SDKs to ARM, including DLSS, RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), RTX Memory Utility (RTXMU), and RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI). The company also announced that the SDKs for these tools for Arm with both Linux and Chromium would soon be available for developers in the future if they are not already available.
However, this does not immediately guarantee that people will be able to buy Chromebooks with both an ARM chip and the RTX 3080 GPU. There is still a long way for NVIDIA to go before they can push these Chromebooks into production. Nonetheless, the demos presented at the GDC 2021 point to the possibility of adding such support and proof of establishing such concepts. This also points to the fact that NVIDIA is also interested in building the tools and the necessary software for developing these Chromebooks.
There is certainly no doubt that NVIDIA has developed a newfound interest in making sure that its GPUs work efficiently with its upcoming popular ARM-based systems. It is interesting to note that NVIDIA had purchased ARM for $40 billion only last year.
