Wednesday, October 9th 2019
AMD-made PlayStation 5 Semi-custom Chip Has Ray-tracing Hardware (not a software solution)
Sony's next-generation PlayStation 5 could land under many Christmas trees...in the year 2020, as the company plans a Holiday 2020 launch for the 4K-ready, 8K-capable entertainment system that has a semi-custom chip many times more powerful than the current generation, to support its lofty design goals. By late-2020, Sony calculates that some form of ray-tracing could be a must-have for gaming, and is working with its chip designer AMD to add just that - hardware-acceleration for ray-tracing, and not just something that's pre-baked or emulated over GPGPU.
Mark Cerny, a system architect at Sony's US headquarters, in an interview with Wired, got into the specifics of the hardware driving the company's big platform launch for the turn of the decade. "There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware," he said, adding "which I believe is the statement that people were looking for." Besides raw processing power increases, Sony will focus on getting the memory and storage subsystems right. Both are interdependent, and with fast NAND flash-based storage, Sony can rework memory-management to free up more processing resources. AMD has been rather tight-lipped about ray-tracing on its Radeon GPUs. CEO Lisa Su has been dismissive about the prominence of the tech saying "it's one of the many technologies these days." The company's mid-2019 launch of the "Navi" family of GPUs sees the company skip ray-tracing hardware. The semi-custom chip's GPU at the heart of PlayStation 5 was last reported to be based on the same RDNA architecture.
Source:
Wired
Mark Cerny, a system architect at Sony's US headquarters, in an interview with Wired, got into the specifics of the hardware driving the company's big platform launch for the turn of the decade. "There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware," he said, adding "which I believe is the statement that people were looking for." Besides raw processing power increases, Sony will focus on getting the memory and storage subsystems right. Both are interdependent, and with fast NAND flash-based storage, Sony can rework memory-management to free up more processing resources. AMD has been rather tight-lipped about ray-tracing on its Radeon GPUs. CEO Lisa Su has been dismissive about the prominence of the tech saying "it's one of the many technologies these days." The company's mid-2019 launch of the "Navi" family of GPUs sees the company skip ray-tracing hardware. The semi-custom chip's GPU at the heart of PlayStation 5 was last reported to be based on the same RDNA architecture.
52 Comments on AMD-made PlayStation 5 Semi-custom Chip Has Ray-tracing Hardware (not a software solution)
It is the only way to do proper shadows and lighting
You don't have to raytrace a whole scene. You can use it on certain elements, which limits performance-hit yet allowing for much better IQ.
Ampere next year will probably make RTX much more relevant. Turing is on the slow-side. Only 2080 Super and 2080 Ti can do it decently at 1440p.
- First of all, Sony will not implement Microsoft DXR, they will have their on RTRT baked in Open GL or OpenCL. I believe they will address asymmetrical load type balance to both CPU and GPU, unlike Microsoft DXR that restrictive only to GPU.
- Sony has their own developer pool in SIE, unlike desktop , we only had one GPU maker to bribing every developer.
- Just like las said, you don't have to pull all feature in full scene, and top of that frame scaling was there to ease the process .
Games were experimenting with shadows and lighting back on the playstation1 FFS!
Yoiu dont "NEED" raytracing to make functional shadows and lighting. Just as games were doing terrain deformation long before DX11 came along, RT is jsut another way of doing shadows. It isnt the end all be all of graphics, and many people (including myself) have looked at "RT" enhanced games and see almost no improvement, certianly not enough to justify such a massive performance loss and dedicated hardware!
This is brand new tech. I don't think ray tracing will matter before next year, with Ampere. Turing is too slow for proper ray tracing and I bet AMD's solution will be too (full scene ray tracing that is).
Ray tracing is part of the evolution for pc graphics, which has not changed for the last few years. Just more of the same. Ray tracing is going to bring us next level graphics, over time. True lighting and shadows (as in realistic).
games will need to stop using hacks for effects to look truly mindblowing, and they will in time, just not very soon; real-time ray-tracing is the first step towards that
As you can see there are also no artifacts since it's not a screen space effect. You probably seen POM countless times in games and didn't even know it, maybe you even mistaken it for tessellation. What's absolutely hilarious about this is you'd be amazed about the extent developers go to make DXR function in real time because it never works out of the box, they still need to find hacks to make it feasible.
It won't be as fast as purpose-built RT core, but it would allow a relatively quick reconfiguration to e.g. physics.
Ger real please.
it give you also "proper" anti aliasing, mutch like TXAA, only bether becuase it give even more blur :)
1) PC GPU's get it first in limited cases and it's amazing, if fringe.
2) Consoles make it commonplace in games.
3) Console ports carry it back over to PC and new GPU's have to be able to do it to make those games run well.
That's how I see it going for Ray Tracing. I assume that by the end of the upcoming console generation that Ray Tracing will have almost completely replaced conventional lighting and shadows in games because it probably is the better way to handle the problem. But I don't think nVidia made the right call with the 20 Series because I don't think they needed to be launched that far in advance of the next gen consoles and I do think smoother 4k/high framerate gaming across more segments would have been more useful to gamers of the last two years. Well, more useful than limited Ray Tracing effects that will quickly become obsolete when the next gen consoles have their own take that isn't exactly the same as RTX.