MediaTek Dimensity 9200 mobile ray-tracing targeting 30 FPS when playing Arena Breakout

MediaTek's latest Dimensity 9200 SoC will begin shipping on flagship smartphones by early next year to succeed last year's Dimensity 9000. The latest design is notable for integrating hardware-accelerated ray-tracing on a mobile platform. The feature should be especially appealing on gaming-centric smartphones like the upcoming Asus ROG Phone 6D Ultimate which was announced alongside the Dimensity 9200 last week.

One of the first mobile games to support ray-tracing will be the FPS title Arena Breakout by Tencent. MediaTek says it has been working closely with the game developer in order to better optimize the title for the Dimensity 9200 and its RT features.

Of course, enabling RT will inevitably incur a performance deficit much like on desktop PCs. When asked how much of a performance dip users can expect, MediaTek says frame rates would be cut in half from 60 to 30 FPS if RT is enabled. Whether or not the slower frame rates are worth the increase in visual fidelity is a subjective matter. However, we can at least hope that Tencent will give the option to enable or disable RT at will for more player freedom in how to play the game.

Qualcomm has announced that its next generation Snapdragon will also support RT on mobile, but the feature will more than likely incur a performance deficit as well if enabled. It'll certainly be interesting to see how RT will be utilized for mobile games especially since most titles tend to be cartoony or cel-shaded instead of realistic.