Will Nvidia follow AMD by offering ray tracing on mobile?
AMD delivered a huge amount of news earlier this week when it was announced that the next Samsung Exynos chipset (with an AMD GPU) will support ray tracing technology. That’s a big deal because full-blown ray tracing is currently largely limited to computers and promises far more realistic lighting effects and reflections.
Now Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has journalists (h / t: ZDNet) that the GPU kingpin will not yet follow AMD’s lead by bringing ray tracing to mobile devices.
“To be honest, ray tracing games are pretty extensive. The data set is quite large and there will be a time for it, ”Huang was quoted as saying. “When the time is right, we can consider it.”
Instead, the company thinks its streaming service Geforce Now is a better way to get ray traced on mobile right now.
“This is how we want to reach Android devices, Chrome devices, iOS devices, macOS devices, Linux devices and all kinds of devices, be it on TV, on mobile devices or on the PC,” the CEO allegedly said.
A stopgap before native ray tracing?
Geforce Now is a double-edged sword, however. The upside is that games are streamed in high quality to a variety of devices, using Nvidia’s servers to aid the experience rather than relying on a beefy target device. The downside, however, is that you need a fast internet connection and the service is only available in a few markets. In fact, Asia, Latin America, most of the Middle East, and most of Africa cannot compete.
Still, Nvidia seems open to the possibility of native ray tracing on mobile devices across the board. The company hasn’t released a brand new mobile chip in a long time, but its purchase agreement for Arm leaves the door open to its GPU smarts on smartphones and other mobile devices.
Speaking of arm, the British chip designer repeated: Android Authority that it was actually working on ray tracing technology.
“Ray tracing is part of our active research work and is therefore processed in our development laboratories,” said Product Marketing Director Andy Craigen during a briefing for the latest Mali GPUs. However, the company was unable to confirm a launch window.
