Ray tracing is one of those magic words, along with 4K, that gets gamers all excited about the graphical possibilities of their favourite games. After all, nothing makes characters pop more than realistic shadows and physics effects, even if it has very little impact on the overall gameplay.
And now a new partnership between AMD and Samsung has been announced, which will provide RDNA 2 graphics technology for an Exynos (the name Samsung uses for its own in-house processors) mobile system-on-chip, allowing for features like ray tracing and variable rate shading on Samsung’s flagship mobile devices. As AMD CEO Lisa Su had to say at the ongoing Computex Taipei conference (via The Verge):
The next place you’ll find RDNA 2 will be the high-performance mobile phone market. AMD has partnered with industry leader Samsung for several years to accelerate graphics innovation in the mobile market, and we’re happy to announce that we’ll bring custom graphics IP to Samsung’s next flagship mobile SoC with ray tracing and variable rate shading capabilities. We’re really looking forward to Samsung providing more details later this year.
There are no details yet to know exactly how this new collaboration will work, but the idea of having AMD’s impressive RDNA technology on a mobile device is certainly exciting. It will probably need a chunk of other processing power to make it all work, and it’s perhaps overkill for many serious gamers who haven’t quite adopted the world of mobile gaming. Still, with the push for cloud gaming, integration with bigger monitors and more hardware that makes mobile gaming more viable, having something that looks prettier will certainly help win people over. People prepared to pay the prices for a premium phone that is.
Last Updated: June 3, 2021
Iskape
June 4, 2021 at 06:41
I’m a big supporter of both brands, so I’m keen to see where this goes. Plus, with a bit of hard looking, there are some great mobile games out there.