Qualcomm has just announced its newest mobile platform, the Snapdragon 865, and a key feature of the platform will be “desktop-quality gaming.”
Make of that what you will, but this shouldn’t be confused with games on mobile looking just as good as they do on a desktop with settings maxed out.
It would be easy to take what Qualcomm is boasting and turn it into that. But that’s not the claim the company is making. It’s saying “desktop-quality” because it will offer features you might expect to be part of a desktop experience.
Desktop-quality includes Desktop Forward Rendering
If there’s one takeaway from the gaming improvements of the Snapdragon 865 mobile platform over the Snapdragon 855 Plus, it should be the desktop forward rendering.
What this will do is allow developers to take desktop features, and apply them to their games on mobile. Essentially beefing up the quality of their mobile releases. Specifics include things like desktop-quality lighting and post processing effects.
Qualcomm doesn’t go into a whole lot of detail on what post processing effects, or what lighting effects for that matter. Regardless of that though the result is likely the same. Mobile gaming visuals should look better than ever on devices that have this mobile platform in it.
That is if developer take advantage of those features. That’s essentially the rub for now. This may add a big improvement to mobile gaming. But it will mean nothing at all if there are no games to utilize the tools.
Eventually those will come, however there’s no guarantee that there will be any available when the first device powered by the Snapdragon 865 hits market.
In addition to desktop forward rendering, other desktop-level features will be present. Such as Game Color Plus and support for 144Hz display refresh rate.
The best graphics yet, but will they really be “desktop-quality?”
It’s hard to imagine what graphics for mobile games will look like once they start utilizing the features of the new Snapdragon 865 mobile platform. They will no doubt be the best graphics on mobile yet, but will they really be “desktop-quality” though?
True, there are going to be improvements made. There’s no doubt about that. Consider this though. Every iteration of a new mobile platform up until now has made the claim that it would support console-quality graphics.
And every time new devices come out that have those mobile platforms, developers make use of the tech. Games on smartphones these days look amazing, especially compared to five years ago. None of them really look console-quality though.
At least not current-generation consoles. Visuals on mobile games are noticeably less high-quality than console games you’ll find on the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. So “desktop-quality” gaming should be taken with a grain of salt to some degree.
Visuals will probably be more amazing than they are now. But desktop-quality is a tough sell. Qualcomm does note that they will be ultra-realistic, and that will probably be mostly true. In the end players will just have to wait and see once a game is made available that uses some of these features.