Sony Has Big Plans To Improve Ray Tracing On PS5

Reports have shown that the Japanese leading electronic company –Sony is on its way to radically improve the PS5 experience after the grant of a patent geared at accelerating ray tracing. As a result of these rights, the next-gen games consoles by Sony will remove some pressure from the graphics chip while reducing the time taken on rendering shaded visuals. If you’re unfamiliar with what ray tracing actually mean, okay it’s time to find out.

Ray tracing offers a more realistic reproduction of the way light behaves in terms of reflections and shadows in video games. In 3D games, ray tracing is typically a technique that attempts to emulate the way light works in the real world as it creates more authentic reflections and shadows. With the patent granted to Sony, this would mean that the ray tracing is allowed to be switched on without compromising frame rate and top resolution. The standout feature can now be enabled and utilized throughout top PS5 games.

Ray tracing in basic terms can be likened to a lifelike way of rendering light, shadows, and reflections in a scene. Known to be commonly used in movies and TV shows, its application for games is now possible with regards to powerful hardware. While still on the subject of Sony taking ray-tracing seriously, a post on Sony Group’s website has suggested that a new AI technology, which could increase performance in PS5 games is in the works. A lead researcher by the name of Takafumi Morifuji at Sony Group Corporation is exploring super-resolution technology in ray tracing, which primarily relies on machine learning to make lower resolution images sharper clearer. Morifuji says that this super-resolution ray tracing will have a “large effect on the future”, especially in gaming. The new AI technology is said could greatly improve ray tracing on PS5.

According to an online source – Trusted Reviews, the patent awarded to PS5 architect Mark Cerny is called “System and Method for Accelerated Ray Tracing and System and Method for Accelerated Ray Tracing with Asynchronous Operation and Ray Transformation.” Rights to the patent suggest that dedicated ray-tracing unit (RTU) hardware can now offset the burden handled by the GPU while speeding up things up. Because of its extremely graphically intense feature developers are often required to lower a game’s performance and resolution to implement it effectively.

The source explains that: “The RTU implements traversal logic to traverse the acceleration structure including the transformation of rays as needed to account for variations in coordinate space between levels, stack management, and other tasks to relieve the burden on the shader, communicating intersections to the shader which then calculates whether the intersection hit a transparent or opaque portion of the object intersected.

“Thus, one or more processing cores within the GPU perform accelerated ray-tracing by offloading aspects of processing to the RTU, which traverses the acceleration structure within which the 3D environment is represented.”

While it’s difficult parsing the adequate technical language this requires, the idea is that the new patent would now permit effective reduction of the number of rays that need to be cast in-game, reducing the resources needed for ray tracing while still delivering a comparable experience. Also though the new AI technology that would improve gaming is currently only being used in CG movies the aim is to extend the use of this technology to other areas of entertainment. Thanks to this new tech from Sony, PS5 ray tracing could get a big boost. Ray tracing is an ace in the hole for next-gen games consoles with the most impressive graphical features.

For now, it’s unclear if a slight redesign of the PS5’s hardware would be required to achieve the goals and objectives that the patent presents. However, expectations are that the patent would only see the light of day if the Japanese tech giant decides to release a PS5 Pro in the near future. Recently, the Japanese tech giant Sony unveiled the design of its next-generation PlayStation VR2 headset after a long time which users have continued to receive updates of the next generation VR2 headset in bits