Samsung has confirmed that its forthcoming Exynos 2200 mobile chip will support ray tracing, an advanced graphical technique associated with PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X gaming.
The confirmation was highlighted by known tipster Ice Universe, who highlighted an official statement from Samsung over on Chinese social network Weibo.
This isn’t the first indication we’ve had that Samsung was working on ray tracing support for its mobile devices. Earlier in the year, AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed that the compay was working with Samsung on bringing ray tracing to mobile phones.
Now we know that the Exynos 2200, which will likely power global models of the Samsung Galaxy S22, will indeed pack ray tracing support.
The Exynos 2200 will pack in a GPU based on AMD’s RDNA2 architecture, aka Voyager. This can be found elsewhere in the PS5 and the Xbox Series X home consoles.
Ray tracing is a graphical rendering technique that models the behaviour of light far more realistically than other methods. With ray tracing applied, a game’s reflections and ambient lighting will appear more organic than without.
Unfortunately, ray tracing is extremely expensive in GPU resource terms, which means that developers often struggle to implement it on PS5, Xbox Series X, and even high-end PC games without a serious hit to performance.
It remains to be seen, then, how practical Samsung’s mobile implementation will be, where resources are even more thinly stretched, and where raw performance has to be weighed against thermal and battery life concerns.