How are smartphone GPUs capable of real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing when usually it’s relegated to expensive and power-hungry desktop GPUs?

Question

I’m just wondering what kinds of engineering fuckery people have come up with in order to pack that much power in such a small package. Not too long ago I heard about mobile chips being capable of hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, and I remember when that kind of tech was limited to NVIDIA and AMD cards that cost like a thousand bucks.

In: Technology

Answer 1

they’re not doing the same thing, not at the same scale. You can build a lego car with an electric motor, but it won’t take you as far as a real electric car and it won’t take as much weight with it. Similarly, you can do a demo with some ray tracing on smartphones, but it won’t be like rendering Cyberpunk 2077 with big gamer GPU ray tracing, because that’s waaay too much work! Ray tracing becomes a lot of work when there are more pixels and when the scene is more complex too.

Finally, GPUs are already “hardware acceleration”, but smartphones GPUs do not have anything dedicated to ray tracing like gaming GPUs afaik. So it might be just the words that are misleading.