Sony patents method for “significant improvement of ray tracing speed”

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  Cyberpunk 2077, patch 1.5, PlayStation 5, ray-tracing mode. [credit: CD Projekt Red ]

While video game consoles have finally reached the age of ray tracing, performing those graphical calculations in real time can still be tough on consumer-level hardware. A PS5 game like Gran Turismo 7, for instance, can only handle ray-traced visuals in replays thanks to the processing requirements.

With a newly filed patent, though, Sony engineer Mark Cerny lays out a method that could significantly speed up the ray-tracing process by offloading certain calculations from the GPU to specially designed ray-tracing unit (RTU) hardware. The outlines of the new ray-tracing process are laid out in a patent application titled "System and method for accelerated ray tracing with asynchronous operation and ray transformation." The application was published in the European Union last week after being filed last August.

In Cerny's method, the RTU hardware is specially designed to efficiently traverse so-called acceleration structures in a 3D environment, going through a stack of bounding volumes to identify points where a virtual light ray intersects with an object. Those intersections are then sent to a shader program running on the GPU, which determines whether the object is opaque (a "hit" for the ray-tracing algorithm) or transparent (i.e., the intersection can be ignored).

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