OPPO held its annual developer conference, dubbed ODC21, in Shanghai earlier this week. At the event, the company announced it connected car tech, some information about its animated AI stickers, but one of the most interesting things that OPPO demoed was ray tracing on a smartphone. The reports claimed that it was OPPO’s Reno6 Pro 5G smartphone, though the company didn’t comment anything on it.

Ray tracing on smartphones is a “big” thing. For those of you who don’t know, ray tracing tracks how a light ray would reflect in real life. Though it sounds quite simple, it’s a much-complicated physics model to implement on a PC, let alone a smartphone and requires high amounts of processing. But the result is that it allows developers to make better-looking games and 3D models.

OPPO has now managed to bring the capability to a smartphone. The company previewed many scenes with ray tracing enabled and disabled, and the difference is quite evident. OPPO says that it was able to integrate the feature only via Google’s already available Vulkan API and the feature is part of ColorOS. It is expected to debut in 2022.

Ray tracing on smartphones is difficult to implement, but companies have been working to bring the feature to the little gadgets in our hands. Samsung has also confirmed that the next-generation flagship smartphone will feature AMD mRDNA GPU that will allow it to support ray tracing.

Someone on YouTube was able to grab the part of the ODC21 conference wherein OPPO demoed the ray-tracing capabilities on a smartphone. Watch it embedded below:

(Please make a note that this isn’t officially uploaded by OPPO but rather someone else on YouTube.)

Via: GizmoChina