Samsung debuted its first Exynos SoC with hardware-accelerated ray tracing support earlier this year. The all-new Exynos 2200 featured its first AMD RDNA 2-based GPU, the Xclipse 920, which not only enabled ray tracing on mobile but also promised "console-quality" immersive visuals in mobile games. Arm followed it up with the Immortalis-G715 GPU in June, its first GPU to support hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Qualcomm is now following suit with its latest flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Ahead of its official announcement, Oppo has demoed its open ray tracing solution that will enable developers and creators to offer new ray tracing experiences on devices featuring Qualcomm's latest chipset.

Oppo's ray tracing solution for mobile devices utilizes a modified version of Oppo's proprietary PhysRay SDK that enables ray tracing technology "to be applied to complex, large-scale game scenes on mobile devices." Oppo demonstrated its technology's prowess using a first-person shooter game called "Camp Guard," with over 2000 physical models, 800,000 triangles, and close to 100 textures at Snapdragon Summit 2022. The interactive demo showcases improved shadows, lights, and reflections that realistically react to the model's movement and the player's camera angle. Oppo claims its first-person shooter demo can run at 720p resolution at 60 frames per second for half an hour on a room-temperature device featuring the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC.

In a press release on its new ray tracing solution, Oppo noted that it worked with Qualcomm on the "driver testing, shader optimization, and compiler tool development over the game scene." The companies also optimized the PhysRay Engine 2.0 drivers so that the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can smoothly render different ray tracing effects and textures. Oppo's solution also supports Qualcomm's Variable Rate Shading (VRS) technology, which ensures that the PhysRay Engine 2.0 "can run efficiently on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Improving the graphics immensely while solving the power consumption problem."

Although Oppo's PhysRay Engine 2.0 utilizes a proprietary PhysRay SDK, it's a fully open ray tracing solution available to all game developers and creators globally. The company believes that the following three features make it a great choice for game developers looking to implement ray tracing on their titles:

  • Convenient: PhysRay Engine supports hybrid rendering of ray tracing and rasterizations. Game developers can add Oppo's mobile ray tracing pipeline directly without making drastic changes to the traditional rendering pipeline.
  • Adaptive: PhysRay Engine is not only capable of dynamically adjusting the complexity and efficiency of the ray tracing algorithm according to different scenarios, but also adopts a standard port. It is integrated with artificial intelligence and supports physical sensors, so as to support full-path ray tracing and other effects in the future. Developers can fully utilize ray tracing technology on mobile devices without restriction, and produce more unique and surprising results.
  • Balance: Opp's collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies has made PhysRay Engine more balanced in terms of performance and power consumption. Based on the premium Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Oppo's PhysRay Engine has increased its ray tracing ender efficiency by a factor of 5, reduced the CPU workload to one-tenth, and enables all PBR textures.