Snap’s ongoing work in the world of augmented reality has led to a new development.
The company has introduced Ray Tracing to developers. Described as a “technical capability,” it can enhance realism in AR experiences by “reflecting light on digital objects.” This means lenses that feature AR diamond jewelry, for example, will look more realistic.
Since we’re talking about diamonds, it only makes sense that Tiffany & Co. be the first to levrage Ray Tracing. With the Tiffany Lock Lens, Snapchatters can try on the company’s Lock bracelts and even purchase them through the app.
Head to their website for the QR code. The lens is available to iOS and Android users around the world.
Apple’s chip engineers seemed to be overly ambitious ahead of the iPhone 14’s launch. A new report from The Information outlines how the company scrapped plans for an ultrapowerful mobile GPU before the iPhone 14’s release.
The report also details two lawsuits Apple is engaged in with chip-making startups over what the tech giant claims is stolen proprietary chip design information.
However, what’s most interesting is that Apple is working to bring ray tracing-enabled tech to the iPhone. This relatively recent gaming graphics feature allows for more realistic lighting, shadows and reflections, but it draws a significant amount of power. According to the report, Apple was working on the feature for the iPhone 14 Pro, but had to cut it since it pulled too much power and generated a lot of heat.
Apple may not have gotten ray tracing working on the iPhone 14 series, but it’s fascinating to learn that the company is working on the technology. If Apple can get it up and running, it should give the iPhone and iPad a significant leg up in the portable gaming space. Mobile game Lego Star Wars Castaways already blew me away this year with its graphics, and I can only imagine how much better it would get with ray traced lighting.
Samsung announced its latest mobile processor, the Exynos 2200, sporting a new graphics processing unit (GPU) using AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture dubbed ‘Xclipse.’
Ray tracing, for those unfamiliar with the tech, attempts to simulate how light physically behaves. In video games, ray tracing can help produce more realistic-looking lighting effects, including light that can bounce off reflective surfaces. However, so far ray tracing has proven to be difficult for GPUs to handle and often brings a significant performance hit compared to other lighting solutions.
Still, it’s impressive to see the technology come to mobile chips. It’ll be interesting to see how well it works in practice. Moreover, Samsung shared this surprisingly weird video touting the capabilities of the Exynos 2200 GPU:
Aside from the benefits of AMD RDNA 2 and ray tracing in Xclipse, the Exynos 2200 chip sports other benefits. Samsung says the chip uses a 4nm extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) process and is one of the first in the mark to integrate Arm’s latest ARMv9 CPU cores. The ARMv9 cores offer a significant improvement over ARMv8 in both performance and security.
Specifically, the octa-core Exynos 2200 sports a tri-cluster structure with a single ARM Cortex-X2 core, three performance and efficiency balanced Cortex-A710 ‘big cores’ and four power-efficient Cortex-A510 ‘little cores.’
Exynos 2200 also support powerful on-device artificial intelligence (AI) thanks to an upgraded neural processing unit (NPU) and both sub-6 and mmWave 5G through an improved modem.
Finally, Samsung touted the chip’s image signal processor (ISP), which has a redesigned architecture that supports resolutions of up to 200 megapixels. When recording video at 30fps, the ISP supports up to 108 megapixels in single camera mode and 64+36 megapixels in dual camera mode. The ISP can connect up to seven individual image sensors and drive four sensors simultaneously for multi-camera set-ups. The ISP also supports up to 4K HDR or 8K recording.
While the Exynos 2200 certainly sounds impressive, Canadians might not get to try it out. Samsung typically launches its flagship phones in Canada with Qualcomm Snapdragon chips instead of its own Exynos (usually, Exynos chips power Samsung devices outside of North America). Of course, we won’t know for certain until devices rocking the Exynos 2200 release — for now, though, it’s probably safe to assume we won’t get those devices in Canada.
