Sony appears to have big plans for ray tracing on PS5
Sony appears to be working on ways to improve ray tracing on PS5, according to a listing on the Sony Group Portal website and a recently filed patent.
If you’re not familiar with ray tracing, the simplest way to describe it is a more advanced and lifelike way of rendering light, shadows, and reflections in a scene. Ray tracing is commonly used in movies and TV shows, and its application in games is now possible thanks to more powerful hardware.
However, ray tracing is an extremely graphically intense feature that often requires developers to lower a game’s performance and resolution to implement it effectively on PS5. This has been the case in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, Control Ultimate Edition, and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, though developer Insomniac does offer a Performance RT mode, which includes a lower fidelity form of ray tracing but keeps the frame rate at 60fps.
Sony, then, looks to be trying to address the toll that ray tracing can have on a developer’s resources. A post on Sony Group’s website highlights a new AI technology, which could increase performance in PS5 games. Takafumi Morifuji, a lead researcher at Sony Group Corporation, is exploring super-resolution technology in ray tracing, which essentially relies on machine learning to make lower resolution images sharper and more clear.
Even though the new AI technology is currently only being tested in CG movies, Morifuji says that super-resolution ray tracing will have a “large effect in the future”, and “the aim is to extend the use of technology to games, movies, and other areas of entertainment.” There’s no reason why, then, we couldn’t eventually see super-resolution technology in ray tracing be used on PS5.
Another sign that Sony is
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