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Samsung Exynos Chip With AMD Graphics To Bring Ray-Tracing To Mobile (liliputing.com) 26
Two years after announcing plans to bring AMD graphics to Samsung Exynos mobile chips, it looks like the first of those chips could be ready to launch soon. From a report: During a Computex keynote, AMD's Lisa Su said that Samsung's "next flagship" mobile system-on-a-chip would feature custom graphics from AMD featuring the company's RDNA 2 graphics architecture. What does that means for mobile devices powered by the chip? The kind of graphics horsepower that had usually been associated with discrete GPUs. Su says that the upcoming Exynos chip will support features including ray tracking and variable rate shading. While that wouldn't make it the first ARM-based chip with those features (Apple's M1 processor also supports ray tracing), it could still be enough to help give Samsung an edge over rival Qualcomm.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 (Score:2)
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 already has Variable Rate Shading, and it's been shipping for 6 months.
https://www.qualcomm.com/news/... [qualcomm.com]
So Qualcomm already beat Samsung Exynos to that one. Who will ship ray-tracing GPUs first? We'll see.
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Who will ship ray-tracing GPUs first? We'll see.
PowerVR, in about -5 years.
It's all about more integration (Score:2)
SoC integration will accelerate - firms that can't figure out how to productively use the billions of available transistors on a 2nm die will eventually lose. We will see more hybrid (multiple firm's IP) dies as computer total chip count keeps dropping. This will keep driving industry consolidation (i.e. AMD buying Xilinx).
Whats the point (Score:2)
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What about Crossy Road, you insensitive clod!
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Full of ads? I've never seen a single ad playing this game.
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Still a boring game better controlled with a D-Pad
What's the demand? (Score:2)
Is this just more marketing buzzwords or is there a "real demand" for mobile raytracing?
In a few niche applications it is cool but discrete raytracing on the desktop has been met mostly with "meh" by the general public / gamers especially as the RTX 3080 Ti and 3070 Ti [youtube.com] is seen as a money grab as they are launched at higher prices.
If only we could actually buy modern GPUs ... /s
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"4k output" is a very different animal from "4k 3D rendering".
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Could it be a passing fad that never really works out? Yes.
Nope, [evolutionary] trend. You don't have to be caught up in any of it to see that.
consoles (Score:2)
I see it as a preemptive strike against NVIDIA.
Microsoft may have had a lukewarm response to Windows on Snapdragon but it's game on for a Tegra-based XBox. once the sale of ARM to NVIDIA passes approval.
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Similarly weak minded individuals used to say the same thing when Intel and AMD were trying to push SIMD instruction extensions.
The "meh" response to ray tracing is so far, implementation specific, and on the software side.
The RT cores on an nVidia are
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Is this just more marketing buzzwords or is there a "real demand" for mobile raytracing?
The hardware capability itself is a means to an end, that end being higher fidelity visuals and there's plenty of demand for that. There's demand for more performance and power efficiency but not explicitly for the specific processor architecture changes that enable that to happen.
Why quality of ray tracing? (Score:2)
Ray tracing has existed for decades. It has been possible to do for a long time, given a certain threshold for acceptable quality and performance. The question isn't whether AMD can get ray tracing working on mobile. It's what quality at what performance will be achievable. It's not clear that AMD has caught up to Nvidia ray tracing with their discrete GPUs, and it's even less clear how further behind their mobile chips will be.
It would be great for technological competition and the marketplace for AMD
Ray tracking (Score:2)
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it's for people who want to know where their rays were last night. Most ray tracers don't want to know, it's often not pretty.
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Thanks, I never understood the lyrics of Ray Charles' song hit the road jack.
It's an autobiographical ditty about his girlfriend that gets fed up with Ray tracing?
So if I want graphics horsepower... (Score:2)
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