The “facial computing” era is slowly becoming less of a trendy gadget for “glassholes.” Qualcomm is promising to power the next slate of camera-filled XR headsets and AR glasses with the Snapdragon Reality Elite, a new chip designed, of course, to put AI right in front of your eyes.
There are enough AR glasses available now that we have to make a distinction between “optical see-through”—aka just a freaking pair of glasses—and “video see-through,” which refers to the video passthrough you get through devices like the Samsung Galaxy XR or the Apple Vision Pro. Qualcomm built the Snapdragon Reality Elite chip to power both use cases, though a pair of “extended reality” glasses will naturally have to rely on external devices to power all that “augmented reality” goodness.
Snapdragon Reality Elite is technically a sequel to the chipmaker’s previous Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 found inside devices like the aforementioned Galaxy XR. This time around, Qualcomm promises a significant 60% boost in Adreno GPU performance and a 30% uptick in Kyro CPU capabilities. In addition, the new chip supports 4.4K resolution, per eye, and a maximum refresh rate of 90Hz. Alongside the improved performance, Qualcomm claims we’ll see 20% better battery life than we got from its past-gen chip.
The chip also supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing and promises a 10% reduction in photon-to-photon latency—in other words, the time it takes for an image to beam itself to the displays in front of users’ eyes. The chip supports up to 12 on-device cameras, which are necessary for larger XR headsets, though a pair of glasses will use far fewer sensors (and two cameras may already be two too many).
We’re not likely to see a direct sequel to Galaxy XR anytime soon. Instead, we’ll have to see for ourselves if these improvements make any meaningful difference in Xreal and Google’s Project Aura AR glasses. Those XR spectacles are already up for preorder despite lacking an exact launch price. VR headset maker Play for Dream is also working on a Snapdragon Reality Elite device, though the company has offered no details on what that device may entail.
Software bugs aside, Samsung’s headset was already pretty fast at loading AR content, so a beefier chip could expand the possibilities for what we could put in front of our eyes. More than that, Qualcomm wants you to believe that these chips are purpose-built to run AI. Snapdragon Reality Elite supports up to 48 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of total on-device AI performance, which is enough for very low-end AI models. Otherwise, any kind of agentic assistant will need to rely on cloud computing. That’s a major reason why the Reality Elite supports the latest connectivity standards, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.
The Snapdragon Reality Elite won’t necessarily scale with the hardware’s size, of course. Instead, devices like Project Aura will rely on tethered compute pucks to produce what is transmitted to the displays behind each lens. Just like Qualcomm’s Wear Elite, these new chips are trying to expand the definition of “wearable.” Whether it’s worth shoving yet another computer in our pockets, one that’s tied to our faces by a long cable, remains to be seen.
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