Mobile gamers rejoice! Samsung may soon bring raytracing-enabled Exynos SoC in partnership with AMD

Samsung and AMD team up to shake things up on mobile, the next Exynos SoC will use RDNA 2 technology

Technologies like raytracing have so far been relegated to PCs and consoles but if AMD and Samsung have their way, mobile phones may not be far behind. RDNA 2 is the graphics technology that powers the PS5 and Xbox Series S and X. It also power's Tesla's.

At Computex, AMD announced that they were partnering with Samsung to bring the technology to next generation Exynos SoC for mobile. Samsung will provide more details about the project later in 2021 but this will enable the company to provide advanced technology like ray tracing and variable rate shading on its mobile phones.

AMD's Lisa Su made the announcement on stage where she said people should expect RDNA 2 to now be available for the high-end mobile market. Exynos is Samsung's in-house SoC's made for mobile, though they use Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips for the US.

This naturally sets up high-expectations from the next Samsung flagship and adds value to their Exynos brand by being the first module's capable of ray tracing and variable rate shading on mobile. One thing that would be interesting to see is how much power would be needed to power RDNA 2 on mobile. The other problem is that Qualcomm's Adreno 660 GPU which is part of the Snapdragon 888 SoC and is currently the fastest on Android delivers 3.4 TFLOPS of graphics performance.

To put things in perspective a PlayStation 2 is capable of 6.2 TFLOPS. So you are dealing significantly lesser power to enable these technologies. Regardless, its exciting news to see next generation technologies come to mobile and if nothing else, it will provide developer's with incentive to embrace them for their games.