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
    214·
    1 year ago

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

    • figaro@lemdro.idEnglish
      71·
      1 year 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·
        1 year 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·
          1 year 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

    • kadu@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I completely disagree.

      We are doing rasterization on mobile devices, running shaders, running neural networks… why exactly is ray tracing the only feature left out?

      In fact, the tendency is for 3D graphics to replace rasterization with path tracing entirely. It’s a much better way of creating graphics.

      • giant_smeeg@feddit.ukEnglish
        4·
        1 year 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

        • kadu@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          I’m willing to bet the engineers behind Qualcomm are aware of the challenges with die size.

          • giant_smeeg@feddit.ukEnglish
            2·
            1 year 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·
      1 year 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.

    • bitwolf@lemmy.oneEnglish
      1·
      1 year 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.