The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Qualcomm's new high-end mobile chip for the next wave of Android flagship smartphones, made its debut at the company's annual Snapdragon Summit on November 15, showcasing a number of impressive new technologies.
While some flashy AI and camera features marked the chipset's introduction, another notable improvement focused on mobile gaming; with a significant improvement in incoming visual quality; powered by the addition of hardware accelerated ray tracing.
Simply put, ray tracing adds greater physical precision to the behavior of light in the game world, global illumination, shadows, and ambient occlusion, resulting in more realistic and immersive visuals.
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(*8*)(Image credit: Oppo)
(Image credit: Oppo)(Image credit: Oppo)(Image credit: Oppo)This technology, once reserved for the best graphics cards on the market, then spread to the latest gaming consoles and has now made its way to mobile.
In fact, Samsung's Exynos 2200, introduced in early 2022, was the first mobile chip to support the technology, but less than a year later, Qualcomm not only rolled out lightning to catch up, but brought with it a number of partners committed to capitalizing on the availability of this new graphics enhancement.
Behemoth publishers like Tencent are adding credibility to the technology's broader adoption and success on mobile, while Qualcomm already has a host of hardware partners looking to take advantage of ray tracing in their own way as well.
Brands like Asus, Black Shark, OnePlus, Samsung, Sony, and Xiaomi have been mentioned, but it was Oppo that made sure to actively show off its commitment to 8 Gen 2 and its hardware-accelerated ray tracing during the first day of the Summit.
Oppo's SVP and CPO Pete Lau appeared on video during the presentation, explicitly expressing his enthusiasm for the "next-level gaming" experiences the 8th Gen 2 promises to deliver, but the company didn't bother not to. stop there, bringing senior graphic product manager Jane Tian onstage.
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(Image credit: Future/Alex Walker-Todd)(Image credit: Future/Alex Walker-Todd)(Image credit: Future/Alex Walker-Todd)(*2*)(Image credit: Future/Alex Walker-Todd)(Image credit: Future/Alex Walker-Todd)He spoke in more detail about the results Oppo is already seeing with its sustained ray tracing benchmarks in 8 Gen 2, which, compared to its previous software-only ray tracing, was said to be five times more efficient and it placed 90% less CPU workload. .
The company's history with mobile ray tracing actually led it to create an open source mobile ray tracing development kit, called the PhysRay SDK, which should help developers with things like software and hardware compatibility and Optimize ray tracing between different device configurations.
The mobile ray tracing demos shown on stage have accentuated the benefits the technology is supposed to bring to mobile graphics, but the results speak for themselves, leaving us wondering how long after the first phones come to the market. games that implement the chipset Adreno GPU and its new flagship feature.
Oppo is, naturally, on the list of companies that are committed to launching 8 Gen 2-powered devices in the near future and that it will come packaged inside whatever is the next entry in its flagship Find X series of phones (our money's worth). it's on the Oppo Find X6).
In the meantime, check out our roundup of the best gaming phones currently available, even if it's just to find out which brands to watch out for are coming up with their 8 Gen 2-toting devices.