Qualcomm and Mediatek add Ray tracing to their SoC. When is Apple going to?

[exoticspice1]

Honestly suprising Apple is behind in Hardware accelerated Ray-Tracing?

Now you might say RT in a phone, what's the use well Oppo has given a look here.

This in running on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 which has support for BVH RT.


https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1592697089871745025/



Why is Apple behind in this space? A16 was barely an improvement in GPU features and it had the same GPU cores as A15.

I hope A17 is going to big otherwise Apple will be left behind in the GPU space because EVERY single hardware OEM has hardware accelerated RT now. From Nvidia/Intel/AMD to ARM to now Qualcomm.

 

[Andropov]

Why is Apple behind in this space? A16 was barely an improvement in GPU features and it had the same GPU cores as A15.

Maybe there weren't any improvements to the GPU cores in A16 *precisely* because they're working on ray-tracing. RT is surely going to take some die area to get any meaningful RT capabilities. It could be that the die area required for RT would have eaten into the regular rasterization die area budget. So to avoid a regression in rasterization performance, they could have waited a full year with minimal improvements, and then leverage the improved process node (N3 for the A17?) to fit the RT hardware and maintain rasterization capabilities. And that could also free engineers to work on the RT hardware during that year. The GPU hardware engineers must have been working on something for this last year.

RT is a difficult problem. Some things like the semi-random memory access patterns that tank cache hit rates (first thing that came to mind) could have an unreasonable efficiency cost that Apple, so R&D might still be ongoing... Apple is hardly the first on this kind of things, but when they finally execute, it's often with a more polished solution that clears the quirks and issues other platforms have. Let's hope that's what's happening here.

 

[Herdfan]

Oppo?

I have one of their BR Players. Didn't know they had gone more mainstream.

 

[Nycturne]

Oppo?

I have one of their BR Players. Didn't know they had gone more mainstream.

They killed their BR players to focus on things like smartphones. Very unfortunate, IMO.

 

[Cmaier]

I have it on good authority that ray tracing is ready to go. No idea which product will be the first to have it, but I would assume Apple thinks it’s more useful on devices with screens big enough where normal humans can tell the difference.

 

[Herdfan]

They killed their BR players to focus on things like smartphones. Very unfortunate, IMO.

Well, let's face it, not too many people are willing to pay $500 or $900 for a BR player.

 

[exoticspice1]

I have it on good authority that ray tracing is ready to go. No idea which product will be the first to have it, but I would assume Apple thinks it’s more useful on devices with screens big enough where normal humans can tell the difference.

You can ready notice the difference in the the Oppo video. So it is noticeable on smartphones.

 

[Cmaier]

You can ready notice the difference in the the Oppo video. So it is noticeable on smartphones.

I can’t. Maybe you can.

In any event, it is a technology that is certainly more important on bigger screens.

 

[leman]

I am taking that video with a big grain of salt until raytracing performance of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can be independently quantified. All that video show is a comparison between a renderer that shows some fairly common modern effects like detailed reflections and global illumination (which were ubiquitous and real-time well before the age of hardware ray tracing) vs. a renderer that has all the quality settings toned way down and implementing no advanced effects.

As to Apple, we know that they are working on a hardware RT solution and I hope it will ship soon. How successful it is going to be remains to be seen.

 

[diamond.g]

I am taking that video with a big grain of salt until raytracing performance of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 can be independently quantified. All that video show is a comparison between a renderer that shows some fairly common modern effects like detailed reflections and global illumination (which were ubiquitous and real-time well before the age of hardware ray tracing) vs. a renderer that has all the quality settings toned way down and implementing no advanced effects.

As to Apple, we know that they are working on a hardware RT solution and I hope it will ship soon. How successful it is going to be remains to be seen.

That will be interesting to see. Not sure if GFXBench or 3DMark will be the first with a Vulkan RT benchmark.