NetEase and Huawei show off ray tracing in a mobile game

Real-time ray tracing usually requires a high-end Nvidia graphics card, but NetEase pulled it off using a Kirin processor

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NetEase and Huawei show off ray tracing in a mobile game

Published: 12:04am, 22 Nov 2019Updated: 4:28am, 22 Nov 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Chinese tech giant NetEase says it’s achieved ray tracing in a mobile game for the first time. The company recently demonstrated ray tracing in its flagship MMORPG game Love is Justice using Huawei’s latest Kirin chip and EMUI operating system.

Ray tracing technology allows computer programs to simulate the movement of light in a virtual space, mimicking the way light would reflect off surfaces in a given space and making for a more photorealistic environment.

Ray tracing has already been used in Hollywood animation for years, but rendering a single frame of a Pixar movie could take hours. And modern blockbusters might take days to render a short scene.

A demo of Love is Justice shown by NetEase to demonstrate how ray tracing affects the game’s graphics. (Picture: NetEase)

Real-time ray tracing in games is very resource intensive, which is trouble when it comes to running games on smartphones. It has only recently been achievable in PC games with modern graphics cards like the Nvidia RTX line.

So even though NetEase has pulled it off on a mobile processor, it likely leads to much shorter battery life.

“It will take all the processing power it can get,” said Zeng Xiancheng, a developer and founder of FYQD Studio. “I also won’t rule out the possibility that [NetEase’s demo] has a hard frame rate cap. By and large, a cap on 30 frames per second can relieve a lot of pressure in terms of heating up and power consumption.”