Oh this one I remember. Thanks! Seems rather a backend solution with a cache modification. Even an hybrid one based on AMD patent
Take a deep look please
“A texture processor based ray tracing accelerator method and system are described. The system includes a shader, texture processor (TP) and cache, which are interconnected. The TP includes a texture address unit (TA), a texture cache processor (TCP), a filter pipeline unit and a ray intersection engine. The shader sends a texture instruction which contains ray data and a pointer to a bounded volume hierarchy (BVH) node to the TA. The TCP uses an address provided by the TA to fetch BVH node data from the cache. The ray intersection engine performs ray-BVH node type intersection testing using the ray data and the BVH node data. The intersection testing results and indications for BVH traversal are returned to the shader via a texture data return path. The shader reviews the intersection results and the indications to decide how to traverse to the next BVH node.”
Every time Sony spoke of RT they just said “Ray-Tracing” lol.
To quote Nvidia: “Hardware acceleration makes a big difference. But the real distinction isn’t between hardware and software, but between GPU acceleration with and without dedicated RT Cores.”
I’m really wary of Cerny’s claims you know why. If he brought solid proofs we can check then ok, if not it is suspicious. Like the RDNA2 based or when asked about VRS he was dancing around and no answer since then. Too much smoke.
But did he bring any metrics or datas to back up since then? He never mentionned dedicated hardware RT cores too.
Sorry but it is really too suspicious.
That approach really seems GPU-accelerated software ray tracing (muffled speak for hardware accelerated software based raytracing).
Why didn’t Sony just come out & say dedicated RT cores for PS5?
Cause theres’s a difference between hardware accelerated on the gpu shader cores, as opposed to hardware offload to dedicated RT cores on the gpu.
In fact the XSX could use either or both or cloud based RT accelerated scene data.
I am sure Sony modified the texture unit block of the GPU to handle Ray tracing easier. It isnt actually dedicated HW, it’s still done on the GPU.
PS5 will be able to run ray tracing better than if it was a pure software solution but it will still be slower than actual true dedicated HW RT cores.
That’s the reason why its called Hybrid RT since they did modify the GPU to handle RT better but they didn’t actually add any dedicated HW for it.
RT cores is truly Hardware. Look up how Nvidia describe Hardware RayTracing.
Dedicated RT cores speed up the process and are more accurate than doing it on the GPU, even if the GPU was modified to help with RT.
If your GPU has HW RT it’s going to be down to how many RT cores and possibly even how efficient your GPU/CPU is, how much of and how fast your memory is and how fast is your SSD, lots of variables.
Did Cerny show or speak bout RT cores on PS5? Nope!
Imho, that’s what I understood.