Topic: Playstation 5 Hardware Ray Tracing

The PS5 uses the existing Texture units,shader units and cache which are interconnected to the Ray intersection engine,the RT is done by the RIE that handles a BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) structure built into the compute units.

This system uses the existing texture cache which reduces the load put on the memory subsystem and no extra cache is needed.The shader units control the transversal and RT calculations,bypassing the fixed function hardware, this results in a smaller die and less cost.

Shown here are descriptions of RT done by Nvidia and AMD which the PS5 is using.

Nvidia: A tree based RT accelerator structure called Bounding Volume Hierarchy used to calculation where rays and triangles intersect.

PS5: A fixed function RT accelerator for a single node BVH tree and a shader unit to schedule processing.