Sony’s new ray-tracing related patents exposed

Sony PS5 console, paired with games such as Spider-Man & Ratchet and Clank, shows players just how good ray tracing can be. In the future, Sony seems to want to squeeze more ray tracing performance from the host, because a Sony patent on ray tracing acceleration was recently exposed.

From the relevant documents, it can be known that the patent exposed this time is related to ray tracing, and the content mainly revolves around how to speed up the rendering time when ray tracing is turned on, and at the same time reduce the burden on the GPU in terms of ray tracing. Specifically, this will be achieved through an RTU independent of the GPU, that is, a hardware-implemented ray tracing unit. This separate unit can work asynchronously with the shader, improving the efficiency of ray tracing.

Unfortunately, there is no way to know whether this technology will be applied to the current generation PS5. After all, the PS5 currently uses an AMD RDNA2 GPU, which already has a dedicated ray-tracing unit. If you want to use additional units to accelerate ray tracing as stated in the patent, then an update is required in terms of hardware, so it is more likely to appear in PS5 Pro. This technology won’t even appear until the next generation of consoles.

For now, the PS5 is still a relatively new console. Although the supply is still relatively tight, Sony obviously will not stop the pace of research and development. If this patent can be successfully applied, I believe that the attractiveness of ray tracing in games can be raised to a higher level in the future.