With Sony’s latest console thePlayStation 5just over one year old, games are not yet pushing the limits of the system’s hardware. This puts the system right in the sweet spot of a console’s life cycle, when it is far too soon to question its future,meaning Sony can focus solely on new games.
The research and development side of Sony’sPlayStation 5cannot afford to rest on its laurels, however. Video game hardware development is a constantly shifting landscape, and it takes a long time to go from a concept to a product people can buy. The newest ideas today could be out of date by the time a new console to put them in comes out.
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Sony is continuing with its R&D, it seems, as it has patented a new accelerated ray tracing system. The patent describes a way to speed up the rendering time on shading while also taking pressure off the GPU. A similar patent was filed not long ago by Sony, but this new one only differs by the addition of asynchronous operation and ray transformation.
Ray tracing is one of the most significant upgradesto the latest console generation. It is a rendering method for realistic light and shadow, but it is also extremely taxing on the GPU. This latest patent essentially describes an implemented ray tracing unit (RTU), an independent piece of the GPU, used only for ray tracing. This RTU could work asynchronously with the shading program to shorten the rays, thus accelerating the process for ray tracing, while also taking the strain away from the rest of the GPU.
This patent doesn’t really hint at any sort of revision to thePS5 which is still under high demand. Nor does it give cause for speculation on a PS5 Pro console, it is still far too early in the console’s life cycle to expect an announcement on that any time soon. The patent also describes the RTUs as “hardware-implemented” this ambiguous language doesn’t answer whether the patent could be applied to the hardware of the PS5, or whether a software update would allow the console’s hardware to self-implement an RTU within the GPU.
The patent does clearly show one thing, that Sony is still in active development on improvements to the graphical capabilities that could be applied to the PS5. Many recent releases for the PS5 such asHorizon Forbidden Westhave come with trade-offsbetween performance mode or resolution mode. These options allow either more fluid 60fps gameplay, or visual enhancements but with a reduced frame rate. A new way of rendering things like lighting may be the key to bridging the gap between these modes.
