Yesterday Qualcomm officially announced its new flagship processor, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, and Oppo has already shown the new chip’s capabilities. So far, the manufacturer hasn’t announced a new smartphone based on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor. Instead, the company showed a short presentation, during which it introduced the ray tracing feature in video games.
It’s worth noting right away that this is software ray tracing, not hardware ray tracing, so it’s still not an incredible breakthrough. On the other hand, video games with improved lighting and shadows look more attractive and allow developers to improve their projects without any special hardware requirements noticeably.
For example, a user doesn’t need to buy a particular smartphone with a specific hardware ray tracing unit – it’s enough to have a smartphone with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to make graphics look more attractive in specific video games that implement support for better ray tracing.
So far, such video games are not very many. Still, if the graphics on smartphones will develop so quickly, we can safely talk about the possibility of smartphones quietly competing with consoles in a couple of generations. After all, the graphics on smartphones already look very cool, and with ray tracing, it will become more attractive. The mobile chips themselves are becoming more and more powerful every year. This can not help but please.
