During the Snapdragon Summit 2022 event, Oppo said the key advances offered by the new chip will be a “leap in video, gaming, and connectivity experiences.” Chief among them will be ray tracing within Android games. The next-generation Find X will arrive with capabilities akin to the current crop of gaming consoles and high-end PC gaming rigs. In short, it promises a new era of visual realism for Android gaming. In a press release announcing the Gen 2 for the next Find X, the phone’s manufacturer said Oppo and Qualcomm have collaborating on next-gen driver development, to enable hardware-based ray-tracing.

The Microsoft Surface Pro 8 has been bundled with the official type cover in the Black Friday sale. “Running on a device powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform, with multiple ray tracing effects turned on, top mobile games can run at a steady 60 FPS while providing life like soft shadows and reflections for the highest gaming visual quality. Compared with previous software only generation, ray tracing render efficiency increased by a factor of 5 and reduced the CPU workload by 90%, the company said. “These advances will enable the mobile game industry to step away from its reliance on using software simulation to achieve ray tracing effects, and instead bring advanced, ultra-realistic lighting to complex, large-scale game scenes on mobile devices.” Oppo said it was the only manufacturer to showcase this tech at the Snapdragon Summit, but it’s likely other Android manufacturers will take advantage if developers decide to integrate ray tracing. Elsewhere, Oppo is promising a big boost in AI capabilities. It has worked with Qualcomm and Google to integrate Google Cloud Vertex AI NAS technology. That’s a first for smartphones. “The new solution will boost energy efficiency and latency of AI processing on mobile devices,” Oppo says. “OPPO’s implementation achieves a 27% reduction in power of the target detection algorithm and a 40% reduction in computing latency. Together, these improvements will enable AI models to be trained with greater energy efficiency and hardware friendliness in a shorter timeframe,” the release continues. It’s not clear when the Oppo Find X will arrive, but it’ll need to be some point in the next few months if the company plans to be among the first to rock the Gen 2.