What Display Daily thinks: Essentially, ray tracing enables photorealism in rendering, but requires display innovation to accurately convey this level of realism.
Advanced display capabilities can unlock ray tracing’s full potential. High resolutions, HDR with local dimming zones, and technologies like MiniLED backlights, for example, allow displays to reveal finer details and gradients in ray traced lighting. High refresh rates and quick response times complement ray tracing’s output. OLED’s per-pixel control creates inky shadows and vibrant highlights. Essentially, ray tracing enables photorealism in rendering, but requires display innovation to accurately convey this level of realism. So displays with higher resolutions, HDR, local dimming, and fast refresh rates are key to enabling users to fully experience and appreciate the benefits of real-time ray tracing.
There you have it, it’s pushing 8K smartphone displays and giving succor to the highest specifications of the display. The readers of Display Daily couldn’t ask for anything more. But, ask yourself this, are you really selling the benefits or just aping the keywords? Pitching ray tracing in the PC world is preaching to gamers who are fully aware of what the technology means. Pitching ray tracing on smartphones should never be confused with the PC pitch. It needs more nuance, more explanation, and more evangelism.
Look around and ask yourself, are companies really providing a value proposition for ray tracing that could raise the value of the display technology or, are they just mimicking the PC marketing and assuming the audience is the same? Feels like the latter to me and a lost opportunity.
Too often, the display industry spends most of its time talking to itself, discussing the technology behind manufacturing sheets of glass or new LED materials, organic and otherwise. When it comes to something like ray tracing, where the benefit is a palpable branding or value building proposition for a display based on specs, there seems to be some deer-in-the-headlight moments happening.
Qualcomm’s Push on Real-Time Ray Tracing on Mobile
Ray tracing is an advanced technique for realistically simulating lighting effects like shadows, reflections, and refractions in rendered graphics. While commonly used in films, ray tracing has been limited on mobile devices due to its high computational requirements. However, with recent advances in mobile GPU architecture and APIs, real-time ray tracing is now possible on mobile.
Qualcomm Technologies introduced hardware-accelerated ray tracing support in its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platforms. The upgraded Adreno GPU included specific hardware changes to enable accelerated ray tracing. Qualcomm has also worked to update mobile APIs like Vulkan and OpenGL to support ray tracing extensions.
A leaked slide, purported to be from a Qualcomm presentation on the Snapdragon Gen 3 says suggests it is the built using 4nm processing technology. It touts an intelligent Titan architecture with over 10 billion parameters and support for large multi-modality AI models like Meta’s Llama. The Kryo CPU delivers up to 3.3GHz speeds with a 1+5+2 configuration, making it 30% faster and 20% more efficient than prior generations. The Qualcomm AI stack includes Pytorch optimization and a Hexagon NPU that is 98% faster for tasks like Stable Diffusion image generation. For graphics, the Adreno GPU is 25% faster and more efficient, enabling 240Hz gaming, 8K upscaling, and ray tracing effects. Additional features include a 5G modem with 10Gbps connectivity, WiFi 7 support, dual Bluetooth, advanced camera ISP and CV capabilities like video object eraser, and Qualcomm’s FastConnect system for robust wireless performance.
But, Qualcomm isn’t the only ray tracing solution looking to compete for mobile customers. Everyone is chasing Apple’s A17 Pro. The upcoming MediaTek Dimensity 9300, in reported benchmarks, performed well against the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, indicating it will be a strong competitor for ray tracing and graphics capabilities. All of this conjecture because there are still concerns about power consumption and overheating, as there has been over Samsung’s Exynos 2400, another ray tracing stalwart. Apple is on a 3nm processor, everyone else is on 4nm. Apple’s silicon is going to be more expensive, and most of the battles around ray tracing capabilities won’t come to light until 2024 when we should expect to see stable implementations and more competition from Android devices targeting Apple’s iPhone 15 series, and possibly, the iPhone 16, which is expected later in 2024. But, rumors and conjecture seem to drive most of the positioning around smartphone features. They are the lifeblood of forums and blogs that follow each rumor like it is a revelation from on high.
Who cares, right? It should be a boon for the display industry. It’s a real opportunity to push display features in a way that hasn’t really been possible before. Most of the smartphone display discussions, up to now, tend to revolve around size, bezels, cutouts, and, fold and flex. Ray tracing could be a showcase for a more holistic view of smartphone displays, taking into consideration all the underlying engineering and performance characteristics beyond just brightness and pixel power.
Will users care about 4nm versus 3nm? Probably not visibly but the impact is going to be on power consumption and response times. Software drivers are going to favor Apple’s tighter integration between its OS and component services, but for the display, Apple’s advantages may not mean much if the games are there to take advantage of the technology and deliver the right experience. It’s best to assume that the opportunity is as much about the creation of perception as anything else. Display vendors need to create a clear differentiation and definition of their own capabilities, and leave the rest of the arguments to Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and MediaTek, and probably Huawei. Ray tracing brings to fruition a diapason of display features on mobile devices, and removes some of the limitations of past conversations.
Or, maybe, mainstream consumers will just gravitate towards the wow factor of ray tracing and glaze over the other intricate tech details.
