2022 can be said to be a year for MediaTek to be proud. The launched Dimensity 8100 and Dimensity 9000 have good performance in terms of cost performance and energy consumption control, and the performance release is also comparable to Qualcomm's flagship at that time.
This situation lasted until the middle of the year when Qualcomm switched back to TSMC technology and pulled out the Snapdragon 8+Gen1, only to regain face in the product line.
In the blink of an eye, a year later, MediaTek's Dimensity 9000 chip also ushered in a new iterative product - Dimensity 9200.
Not only has the freshest ARM architecture been used in the CPU, but the GPU performance has also been greatly improved. It was even rumored a few days ago that it was the A16 that Apple just released this year?
What's more interesting is that this chip also supports hardware light pursuit.
WTF? ? ? Mobile phone, ray chase? But also the hardware level support?
Let me briefly review what ray pursuit is:
Simply put, it is a technology that helps our game screens to be more realistic.
Before Lao Huang's hardware ray chasing came out, the shadow effects we saw in the game were all "false", and the developers manually added light sources through a method called "rasterization".
But the biggest problem with gratings is - it can't interact with other objects, it doesn't reflect off mirrors or floors, and it doesn't go through glass.
Then the picture made here must be different from the world we see. In order to reduce these errors, developers have to add "extra light sources" as diligently as little bees to obtain a relatively ideal picture effect.
The consequence of doing so is undoubtedly that the development cycle is lengthened, and the picture effect produced is not realistic.
And ray tracing can fundamentally curb this problem. After the introduction of ray tracing technology, the light in the game can be reflected, and the work of stacking light sources with high repetition rate in the past is greatly reduced.
In other words, what this Dimensity 9200 is doing now is to move these functions that can only be experienced on the PC side to the mobile phone.
What kind of magic is this? What is the effect of Anguangchasing on mobile phones, and how is it realized.
What's the point of moving it to the mobile phone?
And after watching MediaTek's latest press conference, I realized that Brother Fa's intention to introduce ray tracing to the mobile terminal is not as simple as adding ARM's "hardware" to the chip.
Brother Fa never joked. What he valued was the whole world.
>/ Mobile phone An Guangchai, can you see the effect?
It's useless to say more, let's take a look at the actual effect first. Fa Ge's technical accumulation in light catch-up is mainly reflected in three aspects:
The first is to soften the "shadow" in the picture. Let's think about our own shadow, which looks different under the noon sun and sunset. The former is tougher, while the latter is softer and the edges are smoother Vague.
With the blessing of ray tracing soft shadows, we can better understand the impact of light source changes on shadows, making the picture more layered.
The second is the most intuitive point of ray tracing technology, "ray tracing reflection".
Whether it is water or smooth ground, it can present a more three-dimensional and more realistic reflection scene.
Finally, there is "ray traced refraction", which sounds similar to the above reflection effect, but in fact it is more like the "global illumination calculation" we used to say.
It can reflect different light according to the different materials of the object, so that more details can be added in the dark light environment, and the picture will not look dead black.
>/ In order to realize it, what did Brother Fa do?
In fact, the Mali-710 used by MediaTek last year already supports ray tracing in software, but the "software support" is still not very good, so there has been no trouble after a year.
But the hardware support is different. Whether there is a hardware optical tracking core, the difference in effect between the two can be said to be earth-shaking.
For example, Lao Huang's RTX series that supports hardware ray tracing is twice as fast as the performance of the GTX series graphics cards that do not support ray tracing. . . But the difference in benchmark performance between the two is only about 25%.
This year, the Immortalis-G715 equipped with the Dimensity 9200 has greatly facilitated the realization of mobile hardware ray tracing in terms of hardware configuration.
According to ARM, ray tracing on the new GPU Immortalis-G715 uses only 4% of the shader core area, which can increase the effect of ray tracing by 300%.
And it is precisely this 300% improvement in effect that allows Fa Ge to "safely land" the light-chasing technology that Fa Ge focuses on.
>/ Is ray tracing the future of mobile chips?
This chip is so powerful, can Brother Fa rely on optical chasing to stand up and sing, and continue to make new breakthroughs in the high-end market?
I find it a bit difficult. After all, the high-end market cannot be established overnight. It needs stamina. However, Fa Ge’s preparations to catch up with the mobile light are seen by everyone. Usually, people often joke that Fa Ge is the younger brother of ARM, and use whatever technology is given in the public version.
But this thing is really not something that can be made with a slap of the head. As early as December 2020, Brother Fa started to think about this thing, and started to tinker with this graphical interface called Vulkan.
In October 2021, the ray tracing SDK solution based on Vulkan extensions will be officially launched, and other manufacturers will work together in this regard.
It was not until this year that Vulkan 1.3, which supports light pursuit, was officially released, which took the road of "software ecology" of light pursuit for a while.
After the accumulation of these technologies, the Immortalis-G715 brought by ARM that supports light-tracing is just the last step.
The right time, the right place, and the gathering of people finally brought the effects that could only be seen on the PC to our mobile phones in the past.
At this point, the two questions we mentioned at the beginning, what is the effect of optical tracking on mobile phones, and how to realize optical tracking have already been answered, so there is only one last question left.
Mr. Moore is still alive, but every year someone comes out and says "Moore (Law) is dead"
This also means that in the past, as long as everyone "stacks chip performance", it will be more and more difficult to get everyone to pay for it-everyone chooses TSMC technology and uses ARM architecture, how much difference can it make?
Therefore, manufacturers are also constantly trying to find new "problem-solving" ideas to attract more users.
Two years ago, it was the appearance and mechanical structure of the volume mobile phone. In the past few years, it was the volume image performance and power consumption control.
