Nvidia offers ray tracing on your… Chromebook?

And this time not through GeForce Now.

Chromebooks aren’t known for their graphical prowess, but that could change. MediaTek, the largest manufacturer of ARM chips for mobile devices, is partnering with Nvidia to try to integrate graphics features like ray tracing into consumer-facing ARM devices.

MediaTek CEO, Rick Tsai, commented on the collaboration in a statement; “We look forward to using our technologies in partnership with Nvidia to bring the power of PC GPUs to ARM platforms, enabling new games, content creation and more. GPU acceleration will be a huge boost for the ARM ecosystem.”

This collaborative effort could lead to some competition with the Apple M1, which delivered some pretty impressive gaming performance back in 2020, hitting around 38fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider on the MacBook Air M1. Okay, it’s certainly not an RTX 3090, but the fact that you can play games on a MacBook at over 30fps is still an achievement.

Looks promising…

If you’re lucky, the ARM/Nvidia monster will show no less impressive results, although of course there is no official confirmation of what to expect from cooperation yet. We’ll have to wait for the first commercial product.

If anything comes of it, it probably won’t have to wait until the level of existing gaming laptops, a similar Microsoft-Qualcomm team-up didn’t produce the most expected results for Windows on ARM, as laptops still suffered from a lack of performance.

However, for those who want to play on Chromebooks now, there’s no reason to wait. Cloud streaming platforms like Google Stadia or Nvidia GeForce Now have come a long way since they first hit the market, with ray tracing already available to the latter if you’re a Founders Edition member. You also get real-time DLSS support, so the services are worth checking out if you’re on older hardware but have a solid internet connection.

Here are the best Chromebooks on the market.