The topic of raytracing has now also arrived on game consoles and needed, as well as on the PC, more power than classic 3D calculation methods. Now our colleagues of the PC Games hardware report that Sony has registered a new patent in this context. With the idea, if they are implemented in Games, there could be a less strong power of power when activated for the game graphics rayTracing effects.
To understand what exactly the problem is, we first go to raytracing in general. This type of 3D calculation has not been used in games until late summer 2018, as it eats a lot of power. The classic techniques used for 3D games in turn work with many a trick, so that the end result is not always physically correct. So there is a compromise between photorealism and performance.
More FPS Thanks to patent?
For special rayTracing effects, Nvidia had published the new 2000er graphics card family with the abbreviation RTX in late summer 2018. The RTX is used to distinguish the non-rayTracing GTX graphics cards. Through the special computing cores that the RTX graphics cards make quite expensive, the graphics cards can calculate special rayTracing content in games that support this relatively efficiently.
Also the current game consoles PlayStation 5 (Buy Now 925,00 €) and Xbox Series X promise a certain rayTracing capability. However, such effects need a lot of power – because in contrast to the classic 3D game graphics is tracked at RayTracing every single calculated light beam is pursued to determine quasi in a kind of retrospect, where it comes from and which in the picture in the picture could not have influenced it in the picture at all visible factors. The result is among other things more realistic reflections as well as light and shadow effects, but also less FPS than without these raytracing effects.
The new patent of Sony now relieves the 3D calculation, as long as the idea works really well. The Shader program should therefore only be dealt with hit exams, which allows elsewhere resources for raytracing. Disconnecting the processes may occur in the end that a total of more fps are available. Of course we do not know if the idea is really working properly. And the possible power plus is in the stars. In any case, the patent shows that even Sony actively tries to find out how to get more power out of hardware.
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