Can Mobile Chips Handle Basic Ray Tracing Effects?

Introduction

Ray tracing is a render technique that produces highly realistic lighting and reflections in 3D computer graphics by tracing beams of light as they interact with objects in a scene. Ray tracing is computationally intensive and has traditionally required powerful desktop GPUs, but mobile chips are now becoming capable of basic ray tracing as well. In this article, we’ll look at whether mobile processors can handle basic ray tracing workloads and what that enables for mobile gaming and apps.

Ray Tracing on Mobile Chips

Mobile processors have rapidly advanced to the point where they can now handle some basic ray tracing workloads. Here are some of the factors enabling this:

• Improved GPU architectures – Mobile GPUs like the Adreno 630 are leveraging architectures that are more optimized for graphics and compute workloads. This includes larger numbers of simpler, more power-efficient cores.

• Increased transistor budgets – Chip manufacturing advancements allow fitting more transistors into the same space, giving mobile SoCs more graphics horsepower. The Snapdragon 865 packs over 10 billion transistors.

• Dedicated ray tracing cores – Some mobile GPUs now include dedicated hardware ray tracing cores to accelerate ray/triangle intersection tests, the most demanding part of ray tracing.

• Variable rate shading – This technique focuses compute power on the most visually important areas of a scene, improving performance/efficiency.

• Upscaling techniques – Rendering at lower resolutions and using upscaling can enable real-time ray tracing on mobile. AMD and Nvidia have developed capable upscaling tech.

• Cloud computing – Cloud rendered effects could help enable more advanced ray tracing on mobile in the future by offloading heavy workloads.

Ray Tracing Workloads on Mobile

The level of ray tracing possible on mobile chips today tends to be basic effects for improved realism, but not full ray traced scenes. Some examples include:

• Reflections – Ray traced reflections on glossy surfaces like cars or water. These are more lifelike than older screen space techniques.

• Shadows – Ray traced shadows that take into account transparency and other complex interactions missing from shadow maps.

• Ambient occlusion – An effect that darkens crevices and corners based on ray traced accessibility, grounding objects in a scene.

• Global illumination – Pre-baked global illumination is viable to model diffuse interreflection more accurately.

• Upscaled ray tracing – Full ray traced frames rendered at low res and upscaled with high quality.

So while mobile experiences won’t match the stunning fully ray traced graphics of top desktop GPUs, basic ray tracing can still significantly enhance lighting, reflections, and shadows even on mobile.

Ray Tracing in Mobile Games

Ray tracing is starting to emerge in higher-end mobile games to enhance aspects like lighting and reflections. Here are some examples:

• Minecraft – Low res ray traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination paired with upscaling. Targeting 60 fps on mobile.

• Call of Duty: Mobile – Teaser video showed ray traced shadows and reflection effects running on mobile devices.

• Genshin Impact – Upcoming updates will add ray traced reflections to the popular action RPG on mobile.

• Asphalt 9: Legends – Ray traced car reflections featured in tech demo on Snapdragon 865 smartphone.

Ray tracing can provide that extra level of realism without excessive performance costs in the right mobile games. And mobile ray tracing software and frameworks like Vulkan Ray Tracing will help developers implement it more easily.

The Future of Mobile Ray Tracing

Ray tracing on mobile processors and GPUs will continue improving in future generations:

• Dedicated ray tracing hardware will expand beyond just intersection testing.

• Chip manufacturing advances will deliver efficiency enhancements.

• ML accelerated denoising will enable full ray tracing with fewer samples.

• Upscaling techniques like AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution continue to progress.

• Cloud rendered content could help enable more advanced ray traced graphics.

• 5G networks will reduce latency for cloud gaming/rendering.

So while still limited today, mobile ray tracing performance and capabilities will grow rapidly in the coming years – bringing more cinematic, realistic graphics to mobile gaming and applications.

Conclusion

In summary, current high-end mobile chips like the Snapdragon 865 and A14 Bionic can now handle basic ray tracing workloads, especially with upscaling and optimization techniques. This enables ray traced reflections, shadows, AO, and global illumination to significantly enhance aspects of graphics and lighting in mobile games. While not yet feasible for full ray tracing, mobile ray tracing performance will continue improving quickly in future generations. So ray tracing is set to become a key graphics feature in high-end mobile gaming.