A new round of ray tracing benchmarks with 3DMark's Solar Bay suggests that Snapdragon phones have become much better at ray tracing.

Android Authority: 3DMark’s benchmarking suite has launched its first ray tracing test and we’ve run it on a bunch of phones

  • db2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    20·
    2 years ago

    This is not a feature that a device with limited available power to consume needs. It’s just dumb.

    • figaro@lemdro.idEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      I disagree. I use my old phone exclusively as a gaming device. If it needs power, I plug it in. The better graphics it can handle, the better

      • db2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        So you believe it needs it as a standard feature even though gaming phones that it’s more appropriate for are a thing?

        • figaro@lemdro.idEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          I think it should be a standard feature that game developers are able to take advantage of if they would like to.

          I don’t think you are going to accidentally stumble upon any mobile games that have raytracing anytime soon and wonder why your battery is draining

      • giant_smeeg@feddit.ukEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        The only argument you can really have is about die space. If fixed function hardware is on die for ray tracing.

        The chip could be cheaper or have a larger rasterization GPU block, AV1 encode block etc etc

          • giant_smeeg@feddit.ukEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            Of course. But it’s still an absolute physical trade off. There is only so much die space and power budget or cost. They will have traded something off.

    • tal@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      This is not a feature that a device with limited available power to consume needs.

      I don’t disagree, but I’m not sure that that is the long-run game.

      I think that many of us consider Android to be a supplemental platform to a “heavyweight” computing platform, like Linux, MacOS, or Windows.

      My understanding is that an increasing number of younger people don’t know how to use those platforms. Just a smartphone platform.

      And I see attempts to shift towards heavier-weight Android devices.

      It may be that the aim here is to move towards larger Android devices.

    • bitwolfEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I don’t think we’ll be using dedicated hardware for these work loads for very long.

      FPGAs will likely phone several tasks such as encryption, ray tracing, ml, etc.

      That said I would very much like raytracing in my phone as it is the lowest barrier of entry for VR/AR which could benefit from raytracing.

  • Whirlybird@aussie.zoneEnglish
    9·
    2 years ago

    Awesome, a high end graphics feature that brings even the biggest dGPU to its knees just got better on a mobile phone with a 6” screen and tiny battery. That 8 minutes of playing before the battery dies sure will look fancy!