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Mark Cerny is a Sony engineer who has been the lead system architect for the PS4, PS5, and possibly the PS6. He has filed a patent for 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. This method could allow for more realistic lighting and shadows in games, as well as improved performance and stability. According to the patent, 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). In the case of a hit, the GPU can then send that information back to the RTU, which can "shorten the ray, as there is no point testing past the location of the intersection of the ray with [the opaque object]". That saves processing time that would be wasted calculating further “hits” for objects that are occluded by a closer object1. The patent also states that these RTU functions "can be asynchronous with respect to the shader program". That means the GPU can perform other functions as it waits for the RTU to send back any intersections it finds between light rays and in-game objects. Handling these basics functions in the RTU (which “may include hardware circuitry” specially designed for this traversal) “may result in a significant improvement of ray tracing speed,” the patent says, "as the shader program is only performing hit testing". This method is not based on the hardware of the PS5 or any current AMD or Intel GPUs, which suggests that it is intended for a future PlayStation iteration, possibly the PS6. However, this is still a patent application and not a confirmation of the PS6’s features or specifications. It is possible that Sony may change or abandon this method before the PS6 is released, or that it may use it for a PS5 Pro/Slim model instead. The PS6 release date is expected to be after 2027, according to Sony documents.
OP:
I heard Mark Cerny has path tracing, does Nvidia own Mark Cerny?
Not even close