In the past two years, MediaTek (referred to as Fa Ge) has spared no effort in impacting the high-end mobile Soc market. From Dimensity 1000 to Dimensity 9000, and then to the newly released Dimensity 9200 not long ago, it is really a surprise for more than a year. Not only has the performance of the processor been greatly improved, Fa Ge also showed off its many advanced black technologies, such as 5G new dual-community, WiFi 7, high-fidelity Bluetooth audio, etc. The most eye-catching of them is necessarily "mobile ray tracing". The technology that everyone has been looking forward to for a long time is finally coming as it wishes.
When it comes to ray tracing, the first thing that comes to mind should be Nvidia graphics cards and 3A masterpieces. This technology was first proposed by Nvidia and is equipped with a high-end graphics card in the RTX20 series. After opening it, it can significantly improve the authenticity of the light and shadow effect of the game screen, bringing players a more realistic and immersive gaming experience. At first, only a few games supported ray tracing, and everyone was not optimistic about it. However, with the continuous promotion of the RTX30 series and RTX40 series, more and more games support ray tracing, and players have also discovered that their significance and importance are really big.
(Photo source: Nvidia official)
A long time ago, many users asked whether there is ray tracing on their mobile phones, and whether they can use ray tracing as well? But the industry has not given a definite answer, after all, this is not something that can be done easily. But today, Fa Ge finally realized "mobile ray tracing" on the Dimensity 9200 processor, giving mobile game players the opportunity to use ray tracing technology, which may bring huge changes to the entire industry.
So, what improvements can ray tracing technology bring to the mobile game experience? Why are MediaTek and Qualcomm actively developing and promoting this technology? For ordinary users, do we really need mobile ray tracing? Below, Xiao Lei will discuss these topics with you.
Fa Ge's planning and layout of mobile ray catching up
Friends who are concerned about the development of the mobile phone industry may be more familiar with it. In recent years, Fa Ge has indeed chased and chased all the way in terms of mobile Soc performance. At Dimensity 1000, it was slightly inferior to the same period's Snapdragon 865, but the Dimensity 1100/1200 launched the following year, and the CPU performance has basically tied with Snapdragon 870. This year's Dimensity 8100 and 9000+ have achieved both surpassing Snapdragon 870 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, helping MediaTek gain a preliminary foothold in the high-end market.
(Photo source: Xiaomi official)
Dimensity processor has strong performance, in fact, the leading one is mainly in terms of CPU performance. GPU performance is still a certain gap with Qualcomm and Apple . Therefore, some users who pay more attention to gaming performance may prioritize Qualcomm processor models when choosing a mobile phone rather than Dimensity processor models. In addition, Fa Ge has always had the impression of "high cost performance" in consumers' minds, and has not yet established the image of a high-end brand, which makes it difficult for it to make efforts in the high-end market.
Therefore, if Fa Ge wants to truly reach the high-end and maintain a long-term leading position in the high-end market, he must first make up for his own shortcomings, and mobile ray chasing is the strongest killing move he has used.
According to MediaTek's official introduction, the ray tracing technology supported by Dimensity 9200 mainly improves the texture of the game screen in the following three aspects. The first is soft shadow, which can change the edges and effects of the shadow according to the intensity and light of the light, so that the shadow is closer to reality; the second is light tracing reflection, which can reflect scene objects (i.e. reflection) on mirror, water surface or smooth ground, which is one of the most intuitive ways of reflecting light and dark technology; the third is ambient light shading, which can create differences in light and dark details based on the penetration and reflectivity of objects of different materials, and improve the problem of dark scenes in the game screen.
(Photo source: MediaTek official)
In addition, the GPU performance of the Dimensity 9200 processor itself has also been significantly improved, integrating the new Immortalis-G715 core, and its running score performance even exceeds that of Apple A16. In addition, with ray tracing technology, the screen experience of mobile games will be enhanced epic.Nowadays, many flagship phones are equipped with 2K resolution, high contrast, and high brightness screens, which can better present the light and shadow effect of the ray tracing screen. Compared with desktop monitors, the quality of mobile phone display is really much higher, and it is naturally extremely compatible with ray tracing technology.
With the help of mobile ray tracing technology, Dimensity 9200's shortcomings in gaming performance have been filled and raised to the industry-leading level in one fell swoop, which can help Fa Ge take root in the high-end mobile phone market more firmly. Recently, OPPO and Qualcomm also launched mobile ray tracing technology. Although its PhysRay Engine 2.0 is an open ray tracing solution, it seems that only OPPO and OnePlus announced the first launch of the solution, and other brand models have not chosen to follow up. Therefore, Dimensity 9200 has also achieved a certain market exclusiveness in this regard, and it has a great opportunity to seize Qualcomm's share in the high-end market.
(Photo source: MediaTek official)
The importance of mobile ray tracing technology to MediaTek is self-evident, which is why Fa Ge is persistent in developing mobile ray tracing. As early as 2020, Fa Ge began to develop mobile ray tracing technology, and also released the Vulkan RayQuery technology route, laying the foundation for Fa Ge's subsequent development. has the technical preparation of the previous two generations and the Vulkan 1.3 standard released at the beginning of this year. The difficulty of development for game developers will be greatly reduced, which will be of great help to promote the popularization of ray tracing mobile games.
What is the development prospect on mobile ray tracing mobile
So, do consumers really need mobile ray tracing technology? How great is this technology in the mobile phone industry and what obstacles may it encounter?
What is certain is that mobile ray tracing improves mobile gaming experience quite significantly. It can make it easier for games to achieve realistic light and shadow effects, help small and medium-sized game developers to produce high-quality game works, and is of great significance to promoting the development of the entire mobile game industry. For users who usually like to play mobile games, you can clearly feel the changes in the picture effect after turning on ray tracing. The brightness and dark details may allow you to see some scenes that you cannot find before, avoiding the sneak attack by "Voldemort", which will also be of some help in improving game skills.
(Photo source: MediaTek official)
For some users who don’t play games very much, the experience improvement brought by mobile ray tracing may not be so intuitive. However, with the further development of this technology in the mobile field, more and more apps are compatible and adaptable, which can also improve the user experience of other apps to a certain extent. For example, the mobile QQ has built-in Unreal 4 engine, which enhances the functional experience of virtual images such as Super QQ Show and Centimeter Show. If ray tracing technology is supported, the characters and scenes will become more realistic and three-dimensional. In addition, some apps have now added AR, virtual images, and meta-universe related functions, and ray tracing technology also has a certain auxiliary enhancement effect on them.
ray tracing has been developing in the PC field for several years, and has accumulated a lot of experience in the promotion and popularization of the mobile field. There are also traces to the iterative and upgrade routes of future technology. Moreover, the replacement speed of mobile phones is relatively fast, and the process of decentralizing technology from high-end to mid-range is relatively short, so there is a chance that more users can use ray tracing. The ray tracing technology in the PC field can be said to be "from nothing to something". It has gone through a relatively difficult exploration stage, and only high-end graphics cards are supported, with a high threshold for use and poor popularity. Therefore, ray tracing technology has a unique development environment in the mobile field and is expected to be promoted and popularized in a short period of time.
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Of course, although mobile ray tracing is good, there may also be certain disadvantages, which may hinder its development. First of all, turning on ray tracing on mobile games will inevitably take up a lot of performance, and the corresponding power consumption will increase, which may lead to serious heat generation in the mobile phone and shorten battery life. Secondly, if the game itself is not optimized properly, the screen may become stuttered after turning on ray tracing, and the experience will not be improved, which will seriously drag you down.Finally, the screen size of the mobile phone cannot be compared with large-sized monitors. The user perception may not be obvious, and some people may think that this is a gimmick and has little practical significance.
At present, we are not clear about how Dimensity 9200 performs on mass production machines, how much enhancement and improvement of the game screen, whether there will be body heating, game frame drops, etc. These will need to be announced after the first batch of new machines are launched. But one thing that is certain is that mobile ray tracing will inevitably develop and popularize in the mobile field in the future, and Qualcomm will follow up quickly. There will definitely be some difficulties and obstacles in the early stage, but the future is promising. From the perspective of consumers, even if you are very interested in mobile ray tracing, Xiao Lei doesn’t recommend you to to be the first person to eat crabs . After the product has been tested by the market and there are more gaming software to follow up and adapt, it is not too late for everyone to change the phone.
