OnePlus today announced a technical partnership with Perfect World Games on ray tracing technology. Under this partnership, the ray tracing technology has been brought to Tower of Fantasy in-game play on the OnePlus 11 5G. According to OnePlus, Ray tracing is a technology that enables dynamic in-game lighting, reflections, cross-physics illuminations and shadows, allowing for extreme environmental realism when gaming. The newly launched OnePlus 11 5G is equipped with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform that supports hardware accelerated ray tracing technology, which provides the opportunity for OnePlus to work with Perfect World Games to fully explore the potential of ray tracing on mobile.
Compared to traditional MMORPG games, incorporating ray tracing in open-world games has significant technical challenges, especially on mobile platform. Perfect World Games developed techniques such as a distance-based dynamic object frame-updating mechanism and range-based ray tracing culling based on light source perspective, which enables players to experience real-time stable frames while enjoying ray tracing effects. Additionally, for the open-world scenes in Tower of Fantasy, the ray tracing acceleration structures are further optimized through employing small object culling and view frustum culling based on camera frustum solid angle. By accurately simulating the propagation and interaction of light rays, players can immerse themselves in the Vera desert and experience the more realistic effect of flames from the surroundings and the hot sand underfoot, as explained by OnePlus.
Acording to OnePlus, normally, open world MMORPG game experience is more immersive than traditional MMORPG game due to more realism detailed objects, and this experience is further elevated by ray tracing technology. Occlusion and shadows in open world scenes are accurately calculated to precisely illuminate and shade the objects of all sizes and scales in Tower of Fantasy. This is totally different with traditional rendering methods which often miss intricate details in scenes, leading to inaccurate or missing occlusion and shadows. For instance, by calculating the occlusion effect of the scene under a uniform intensity of light, ray tracing on Tower of Fantasy enhances and improves the contrast between light and dark in the visuals, achieving more realistic shadows and ultimately adding a stronger sense of spatial depth and realism to the game’s environments.
The introduction of mobile ray tracing technology also enables more accurate capturing of shadows and occlusion effects of objects in the distance and behind other objects, resulting in better visual performance compared to traditional rendering techniques.
Moreover, with mobile ray tracing enabled, the game improves the effect of simulating the absorption of physically accurate light as it passes through and reflects off water surfaces. Difficulty here is that light is comprised of various wavelengths of light waves, and when these light waves enter the water, they are absorbed differently.
To improve the graphics quality, engineers from OnePlus and Perfect World Games co-developed the Real-time Inline Ray Tracing Pipeline and a novel Fast Temporal Convergence Algorithm for Ambient Occlusion, specifically tailored to meet the demands of “Tower of Fantasy” by utilizing a forward rendering pipeline.
To cope with the demanding graphics computing power brought by ray tracing technology, the Spatiotemporal Oversampling is employed. With top of the range hardware specs including 16GB LPDDR5X RAM, 256GB ROM with UFS 4.0, and the new Cryo-velocity VC Cooling System, the OnePlus 11 5G can support the real-time rendering of mobile ray tracing on the graphics of Tower of Fantasy.
OnePlus will showcase ray tracing enabled Tower of Fantasy at Hall 3, 3M10 at MWC 2023 from February 27th to March 2nd.
