Samsung has pre-empted its 8 February Unpacked event with an announcement of the chipset expected to drive the Galaxy S22 - in some regions, at least.

The Exynos 2200 mobile processor includes a Samsung Xclipse GPU utilises AMD RDNA 2 architecture and sports hardware-accelerated ray tracing.

Ray tracing is a relatively new technology used primarily in gaming. It has been included in PC graphics cards for the last three years and is part of the DNA of the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 consoles. At a basic level, it enables developers to introduce more realistic lighting and reflection effects in their games.

Variable rate shading is also possible with the new system on chip, which Samsung hopes will usher in a new era of mobile gaming - graphically speaking, at least.

"AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture extends power-efficient, advanced graphics solutions to PCs, laptops, consoles, automobiles and now to mobile phones. Samsung’s Xclipse GPU is the first result of multiple planned generations of AMD RDNA graphics in Exynos SoCs,” said AMD's senior vice president of Radeon technologies, David Wang.

"We can’t wait for mobile phone customers to experience the great gaming experiences based on our technology collaboration."

Other features of the Exynos 2200 include powerful on-device AI, an octa-core CPU made up of an Arm Cortex-X2 flagship-core, three performance and efficiency balanced Cortex-A710 big-cores and four power-efficient Cortex-A510 little-cores, plus a 5G modem.

It is likely to drive the Samsung Galaxy S22 series phones in some regions, although others are thought to run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processing instead.