It’s no secret at this point that for AMD Ray Tracing is not a priority technology in its GPUs, and this has caused its graphics processors, both on computers and consoles, to be inferior to those of NVIDIA in this case. Well, SONY, one of its customers, does not agree with this situation and will implement a series of changes in the future PlayStation to improve performance compared to the current one.
Here’s how SONY will improve Ray Tracing on its future PlayStation
If you’re wondering how we’re so sure SONY will implement these changes, it’s because there’s evidence of it in a patent published in 2021 and therefore after the console’s launch. This patent explains a process that combines software and hardware to be able to support graphics with Ray Tracing on the future PlayStation more efficiently and with higher quality than the current model.
We must start from the fact that the use of brute force is often not the best solution, and that is why algorithms are created to be able to perform different tasks more efficiently with the limited resources available. While AMD still trails NVIDIA on a gen-by-gen basis, RDNA 3 has taken a giant leap from the previous generation, and yet the PS5 GPU is still RDNA 2 with all that that entails.
In addition to the advances that AMD can bring in its graphic architectures, SONY can implement a series of additional elements in the main chip of its future console in order to improve the performance of the future PlayStation with Ray Tracing. That said, let’s see what they have in the kitchen in this regard.
What would those changes be?
Well, SONY is reportedly planning with AMD to add a series of GPU upgrades to what will be a potential PS5 Pro or who knows if a PS6. The idea is to generate each image using three different elements.
- A generator, with the ability to generate a virtual scene that includes a series of virtual elements made up of objects and/or light sources.
- A preprocessor, responsible for checking which elements of the scene should be improved via Ray Tracing and which are not, depending on the position of the camera.
- The final rendering, which is responsible for generating the frame that we see on the screen, that is, the GPU.
The first and third points are already executed in the current hardware, in order to know which geometry goes into the scene and which does not, but it also allows to know where each polygon is in order to build the BVH tree more easily and not having to wait for the last frame. In the end, we are only interested in the topology of the frame, which we can achieve in the scene preprocessor.
The interesting thing, however, is in the preprocessor, which would indicate which parts of the scene would not be affected by certain light sources. Said information would be stored in a cache close to the processor which would save all or part of said information so that interrogation by the GPU would be faster.
How do we know it’s not for the current PS5?
What is curious is that this is precisely one of the advantages that the Infinity cache of the RX 6000 and RX 7000 PC GPUs brings, which, by the way, is unprecedented in current consoles, at both PlayStation and Xbox. In other words, it is the main clue for us to know, along with the date of the patent, that the patent refers to future hardware by mentioning something that is not in current hardware.
The size of the whole BVH tree can reach tens of megabytes, if we add information to each element to say which light sources affect each object, then it is clear that with the little cache that the PS5 GPU it is impossible to achieve and therefore a new system is required and therefore the patent does not refer to the current PlayStation.
