Ray tracing is an ace up its sleeve for next-gen gaming consoles, but Sony won’t be resting on its laurels with one of the PS5 console’s most impressive graphical features.
Sony has received a patent for accelerated ray tracing, which takes some of the load off the graphics chip while reducing render time for shaded graphics. If you’re unfamiliar, ray tracing provides a more realistic reproduction of how light behaves in relation to reflections and shadows in video games.
This patent in question could eventually allow ray tracing to be turned on without sacrificing frame rate and highest resolution, allowing more top PS5 games to take advantage of the prominent feature throughout gameplay.
The patent (via The Gamer), granted to PS5 architect Mark Cerny, is titled “System and Method For Accelerated Ray Tracing and System And Method For Accelerated Ray Tracing With Asynchronous Operation And Ray Transformation.” It suggests that the load currently handled by the GPU could be offset by dedicated ray tracing unit (RTU) hardware, speeding things up.
Filed by PS5 architect and Knack creator Mark Cerny, the patent mentions “System And Method For Accelerated Ray Tracing” and “System And Method For Accelerated Ray Tracing With Asynchronous Operation And Ray Transformation.”#PS5 #PlayStation5 #playstation pic.twitter.com/yyjL8SMfRw
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In typically intrusive language, the patent explains: “The RTU implements traversal logic to traverse the acceleration structure, including transforming rays as needed to account for variations in coordinate space between layers, stack management, and other tasks to offload the shader and communications.” Intersections to the shader, which then calculates whether the intersection hit a transparent or opaque part of the intersected object.
“Thus, one or more processing cores within the GPU perform accelerated ray tracing by offloading aspects of the processing to the RTU, which traverses the acceleration structure in which the 3D environment is rendered.”
Whether that would require a minor redesign of the PS5’s hardware to achieve the patent’s goals remains to be seen. It may be that this patent will come to life if Sony decides to release a PS5 Pro in the coming years.