Sony Patents Accelerated Ray-Tracing Systems

It looks like Sony is looking to continue improving the capabilities of the PlayStation 5, as they have patented a new system for accelerated ray-tracing.

The newest generation of consoles has been out for over a year now, and the inclusion of ray-tracing has been a major selling point for both the Xbox and PlayStation systems. If you don’t know, ray-tracing is a system that allows for more realistic-looking lighting and shadows in games, with the biggest drawback being the tax and pressure it put on GPU’s. You can see this in the fact that many games have a “Quality” mode that is capped at 30fps, due to the strain of ray-tracing.

This new system looks to be for an individual ray-tracing unit (RTU) that would operate independently from the GPU and handle everything related to ray-tracing. This would help alleviate the amount of work that a GPU needs to do to render the rays, and theoretically, boost the performance while using this function as well. This could be what allows us to bridge the game between Quality and Performance modes in games.

The patent doesn’t mention anything about a PlayStation 5 Pro, though given the iterations of the last two generations, we expect that to be announced at some point.

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