Oppo showcases mobile gaming with ray tracing on the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
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The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 – Qualcomm’s new top-tier mobile chip destined for the next wave of flagship Android smartphones – made its debut at the company’s annual Snapdragon Summit on November 15, showcasing a host of impressive new technologies.
While a number of notable AI and camera features interrupted the chipset reveal, there was another noteworthy upgrade aimed at mobile gaming; with a major visual quality improvement inbound; led by the addition of hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Basically, ray tracing adds greater physical accuracy to how light behaves in the game world. While resource-intensive, it promises a significant jump in graphical fidelity by enhancing elements such as reflections, global lighting, shadows, and ambient occlusion, resulting in more realistic and immersive visuals.
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This technology, once reserved for the best graphics cards on the market, then trickled down to the latest game consoles and has now found a home on mobile.
In reality, Samsung’s Exynos 2200 – introduced in early 2022 – was the first mobile chip to support the technology, but less than a year later Qualcomm has not only implemented ray tracing to catch up, but has also brought in a number of partners committed to taking advantage of the availability of this new graphic enhancement.
Giant publishers like Tencent add credibility to the technology’s wider adoption and success on mobile, while Qualcomm already has a host of hardware partners looking to leverage ray tracing in their own way as well.
Brands like Asus, Black Shark, OnePlus, Samsung, Sony and Xiaomi all got a mention, but it was Oppo that was eager to actively show its commitment to the 8 Gen 2 and its hardware-accelerated ray tracing during the first day of the Summit.
Oppo’s SVP and CPO, Pete Lau, appeared on video during the presentation, explicitly expressing his enthusiasm for the “next level gaming” experiences that 8 Gen 2 promises to deliver, but the company didn’t stop there and brought the chief manager of graphics products, Jane Tian on stage.
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She spoke more deeply about the results Oppo is already seeing with its ongoing ray tracing performance testing on 8 Gen 2, which is said to be five times more efficient compared to the earlier software-only ray tracing while putting 90% less work on the CPU.
The company’s history with ray tracing on mobile has led them to create an open source mobile ray tracing developer kit – called the PhysRay SDK – that should help developers with aspects such as software and hardware compatibility and optimization for ray tracing across different devices. device configurations.
The mobile ray tracing demos shown on stage highlighted the benefits the technology should bring to mobile graphics, but the results speak for themselves, leaving us wondering how soon after the first 8 Gen 2 powered phones hit the hit the market, we’ll see games that put the chipset’s Adreno GPU and its new star feature to work.
Oppo is, understandably, on the list of companies committed to launching 8 Gen 2-powered devices in the near future and that it will pack whatever the next entry in its Find X flagship phone series is called (our money is on the Oppo Find X6).
In the meantime, check out our roundup of the best gaming phones available right now, if only to know which brands to keep an eye out for, the release of their 8 Gen 2 devices.