Tag: tracing
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip offers hardware-accelerated ray tracing
Qualcomm has announced its latest flagship mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Along with making it more powerful and efficient than Gen 1 chips, Qualcomm says it has packed more AI smarts into the new platform.
The Snapdragon 8 will tap into the latest Qualcomm AI Engine and upgraded Hexagon processor to offer “faster natural language processing with multi-language translation and advanced AI camera features,” the company claims. The processor has architectural upgrades that will enable up to 4.35 times the AI performance of Gen 1 chips, according to Qualcomm. There will be support for an AI precision format called Int4, which the company suggests will lead to a 60 percent performance/watt improvement over the previous-gen chipset for sustained AI inferencing. Meanwhile, the Sensing Hub will have dual AI processors, which can support features such as custom wake words.
Qualcomm notes that the upgrades will enable new camera-focused features as will. It says Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will enhance photos and videos automatically and in real-time using semantic segmentation. This harnesses an AI neural network to make the camera aware of and individually optimize elements such as faces, hair, clothes and skies. Qualcomm has tuned the chipset to support new sensors, such as Samsung’s 200-megapixel Isocell HP3. Meanwhile, this is the first Snapdragon model with an AV1 codec that supports 8K HDR playback at up to 60 frames per second.
There’s an intriguing feature for mobile gamers: Qualcomm says there will be real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which should improve the visuals on supported games. The company claims the latest Adreno GPU and Kyro CPU deliver over 25 percent faster performance and 40 percent more power efficiency than the Gen 1 chip. Qualcomm adds that it will offer the first mobile-optimized support for the Unreal Engine 5 Metahumans Framework, claiming that this will let players “experience photorealistic human characters in their games.”
On the connectivity front, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will use AI to manage 5G download speeds, latency, coverage and power efficiency. There will be support for dual 5G SIMs as well as WiFi 7 (with speeds of up to 5.8 Gbps). In terms of audio, phones that use the chipset will be able to offer spatial audio with dynamic head tracking, 48kHz lossless music streaming and latency as low as 48ms.
Qualcomm notes that the first phones with the Gen 2 chipset should be available by the end of the year. Partners including ASUS Republic of Gamers, Honor, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Sharp, Sony, Xiaomi and ZTE plan to use the chip in their devices. There’s likely to be more news from Qualcomm in the coming days, as the company is hosting its Snapdragon Summit this week.
The Witcher 3’s ray tracing update finally arrives in December
CD Projekt Red have confirmed the release date for The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt’s ray tracing-enabling Complete Edition update as December 14th. The update will also bring a number of other visual and technical improvements, as well as integrate a number of mods into the fantasy RPG, originally released in 2015. Gameplay from the Complete Edition of The Witcher 3 is due to be shown off in a REDstreams event on Twitch next week, along with some new stuff for the game based on Netflix’s version of Geralt Of Rivia’s adventures.
Halo Infinite to receive ray tracing with Season 3 in March
During its Radeon 7000 GPU unveiling, AMD announced that ray tracing will come to Halo Infinite with its Season 3 update in March 2023. Microsoft first confirmed its cooperation with AMD in October 2021. After the patch, Halo Infinite will include ray-traced shadows in its Arena and Big Team Battle…
Halo Infinite to gain ray tracing with season 3 in 2023
Players of 343 Industries’ futuristic open-world shooter Halo Infinite will be able to bask in the glow of ray traced graphics when the game’s season 3 arrives next year. The inclusion was announced at AMD’s recent, horrifically named AMD Presents:together we advance_gaming livestream, where the company showed off their latest Radeon RX graphics cards. Season 3 of Halo Infinite is expected to launch on March 7th, 2023.
Elden Ring’s latest update might be pointing towards ray tracing and DLC maps
Elden Ring’s latest update arrived earlier this week, and it appears to be harbouring some secrets that might be pointing towards ray tracing, and maybe even DLC.
The main purpose of Elden Ring patch 1.07 was that PvP and PvE balance are now separated, meaning tweaks to one won’t affect the other. However, dataminer Lance MdDonald found that some new menu strings that mention ray tracing were found in the code.
Later on, McDonald was able to enable the ray tracing settings, which he shared a look at on his Twitter. He did note that the feature just seems to be broken for the time being, speculating that it could be some missing shaders that are the problem. McDonald also found that with the ray tracing enabled, the game still uses screen space reflections in water, which means the geometry isn’t rendered twice so it isn’t too intensive performance wise.