Samsung is helping devs optimize ray tracing for mobile games

Ray tracing is barely used by PC and console games today because it is so taxing on performance. It's a technique that simulates how light bounces off surfaces and objects, lending more realism to 3D scenes in video games. It demands powerful hardware, but ray tracing technology is slowly making its way onto mobile devices.

According to Won-Joon Choi, Executive VP at Samsung Electronics and Head of Mobile R&D Office at Mobile eXperience Business, the tech giant wants to help ray tracing development rather than “sit idle and just look at the situation passively.” (via Pocket Tactics)

Samsung assists developers in developing ray tracing games

Samsung's Won-Joon Choi explained at MWC 2023 that the company's mobile division wants to be “actively involved” in developing and optimizing ray tracing technologies for mobile and confirmed that Samsung is already “cooperating with a couple of game developers,” without mentioning any studios or titles.

The company is now assisting game devs with optimizing ray tracing for mobile games, “so once this work has matured, you will be able to actually see the games with ray tracing on the market.” Exactly when we will see the fruits of this labor is unclear, as ray tracing is not at all widespread in the mobile gaming world at this moment.

Nevertheless, Samsung's first Exynos chip featuring AMD RDNA2 graphics, i.e., the Exynos 2200, does support ray tracing. And although the chip itself wasn't a huge success, Samsung is already invested in developing ray tracing technologies and wants to lead the charge in collaboration with game developers. And of course, the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 “for Galaxy” chipset used by the Galaxy S23 series also supports ray tracing and boasts an overclocked GPU and primary CPU core.