Samsung says that it wants to be “actively involved” in aiding the development of ray tracing in mobile games. The news came via the company’s Mobile World Congress presence and comes just weeks after it released its latest flagship phone, theGalaxy S23 Ultra.
That Galaxy S23 Ultra is the hottest new thing fromSamsungand it’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. That’s a chip that just so happens to support hardware-based ray tracing.
PocketTacticsreports that Samsung is super-keen on making ray tracing happen on mobile, despite the current limitations. Wonjoon Choi, EVP, head of mobile R&D at Samsung, reportedly confirmed that Samsung wants to get involved in making ray tracing something that mobile game developers can make proper use of.
“We are providing them with optimization assistance in developing their games, so once this work has matured you will be able to actually see the games with ray tracing on the market," the exec reportedly said. “We don’t plan to sit idle and just look at the situation passively. We want to be actively involved," he added.
The prospect of ray tracing coming to mobile games in any meaningful way will surely be one that excites gamers. Ray tracing is a technique that renders light in a way that makes it look as if it’s coming from a specific light source. It also means that light can be realistically bounced off of in-world objects, but it’s also a technique that requires plenty of graphical horsepower in order to work properly.
That horsepower isn’t something that has traditionally been associated with phones, but that is changing. Super-fast chips from Apple, plus Qualcomm’s own Snapdragon chips, mean that phones and tablets are now faster and more capable than ever before. Let’s not forget that a modified version of the iPhone’s CPU and GPU currently powers its impressive Macs, after all.
Whether or not ray tracing lands on mobile any time soon, we’ll have to wait and see. And whether Samsung will be at the forefront of it is another matter entirely.
