Mark Cerny and Sony Patent New Systems for Accelerated Ray Tracing on PS5

gamerant.com:

With Sony’s latest console the PlayStation 5 just over one year old, games are not yet pushing the limits of the system's hardware. This puts the system right in the sweet spot of a console’s life cycle, when it is far too soon to question its future, meaning Sony can focus solely on new games.

The research and development side of Sony's PlayStation 5 cannot afford to rest on its laurels, however. Video game hardware development is a constantly shifting landscape, and it takes a long time to go from a concept to a product people can buy. The newest ideas today could be out of date by the time a new console to put them in comes out.

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Sony is continuing with its R&D, it seems, as it has patented a new accelerated ray tracing system. The patent describes a way to speed up the rendering time on shading while also taking pressure off the GPU. A similar patent was filed not long ago by Sony, but this new one only differs by the addition of asynchronous operation and ray transformation.

Ray tracing is one of the most significant upgrades to the latest console generation. It is a rendering method for realistic light and shadow, but it is also extremely taxing on the GPU. This latest patent essentially describes an implemented ray tracing unit (RTU), an independent piece of the GPU, used only for ray tracing. This RTU could work asynchronously with the shading program to shorten the rays, thus accelerating the process for ray tracing, while also taking the strain away from the rest of the GPU.

This patent doesn’t really hint at any sort of revision to the PS5 which is still under high demand. Nor does it give cause for speculation on a PS5 Pro console, it is still far too early