Samsung has been working with AMD to bring Radeon graphics to the Exynos chips used in many of the company’s smartphones and tablets, and while Samsung has been pretty quiet about the partnership for the past few years, this June AMD CEO Lisa Su promised that the “next flagship” SoC from Samsung would feature AMD RDNA 2 graphics with support for features like ray tracing.

Now Samsung has confirmed that it’s next-gen Exynos chips will indeed support ray tracing technology.

In a post on Chinese social media service Weibo (a few hours after the a leak from Ice Universe), Samsung explains that ray tracing involves “calculating the position of the light and the reflected area” for more realistic lighting effects when it comes to things like water, shadow, or shiny surfaces in games.

It’s a feature that’s become common in high-end desktop and laptop graphics cards in recent years, but Samsung’s new chips would be the first to support ray tracing for Android phones and tablets… assuming that’s the company’s intended market for the new Exynos processors. It’s also possible that Samsung plans to target Chromebooks or Windows on ARM PCs.

Samsung isn’t saying much about the actual specifications of its upcoming Exynos/RDNA processor, but the company shared an image showing… very little really. In a side-by-side comparison, one picture shows a tank rolling through a fire with a burning building in the background, while another image shows the same scene, but with light from the fire illuminating the bottom of the tank and sides of the building. For some reason Samsung also added a burning car to the second image, which is missing in the first.

via NotebookCheck

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4 replies on “Samsung confirms ray tracing coming to Exynos GPUs”

  1. Every GPU with shaders can execute ray tracing math. Technically, all GPUs support ray tracing.
    It’s just not fast enough to be worth doing in a game without tensor cores, and even then, not usually.

    1. Just because a GPU is capable of performing that specific kind of math, it doesn’t mean that it’s capable of doing it at a pace that is acceptable.

      GPUs that support Ray Tracing have specific hardware features that aid with that specific kind of math work.

      It’s just like video decoding. While technically all CPUs are capable of decoding h265 video (using software decoding), only specific CPUs and GPUs have a unique silicon feature that is dedicated to doing that kind of work, to offload the work from the CPU itself.

  2. On a mobile device?
    You’re not going to get much thermal room to do it, or not to any big capacity. We’re talking about reflections on eyeballs in BFV levels of useless here. And on a mobile device like a small tablet or a large phone, could you even tell the difference? Probably not, since the display itself is competing to suck power from the battery. I mean, even on the Valve SteamDeck, which also has Ray-Tracing support, it is utterly useless and pointless.

    It might be interesting in a large tablet or small laptop form-factor, if they optimise it well. Or maybe even a mobile device which has a Dock to increase its performance, and project to a larger screen/TV. But these are pretty big IFS and Samsung has lost confidence of us enthusiasts to be able to pull something revolutionary off.

    Otherwise, this is all a gimmick made to steal headlines/marketing.

    1. Again and again “Ray Tracing” ads show what I would get with a thoughtful tweak to levels or curves, photographically speaking. The math is cool and sounds sexy, but tracing rays just hardly ever pays off

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