Microsoft's new patent promises more efficient ray tracing for the Xbox and that could be a real boon for AMD's graphics cards too

HardwareGraphics CardsMicrosoft’s new patent promises more efficient ray tracing for the Xbox and that could be a real boon for AMD’s graphics cards tooWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Will RDNA 4 fix Radeon’s biggest weakness?(Image credit: CD Projekt)

Cyberpunk 2077 ray tracing

Will RDNA 4 fix Radeon’s biggest weakness?

While Microsoft’s Xbox consoles would be the main beneficiary of this technique, AMD’s traditionally ray tracing weak GPUs, and graphics cards that aren’t blessed with a ton of VRAM are also a potential winners.

As with all such patents, the details within it are complex but also broad in terms of where they could be used. Its author, Mark Grossman, is a senior architect in Microsoft’s research division, specialising in chip development, and he has a long and distinguished career in GPUs (starting with Silicon Graphics, before moving to ATI Technologies, then AMD, and finally Microsoft).

Last year, he had a patent approved forreducing the memory footprint of meshlets, small groups of polygons as used in mesh shaders. His latest patent (viaTom’s Hardware) follows a near-identical format. To speed up the process of ray tracing, games use BVH structures, which are a little like a flowchart of the volumes that objects in a 3D world take up. BVHs are split into a large overall map, called a top-level acceleration structure (TLAS), and multiple smaller bottom-level ones (BLAS).

Microsoft’s technique avoids using the entire BVH in one go. Instead, small chunks of it are used at a time, and the details of this usage and the part of the BVH in question (called a node) are stored in two lists in the GPU’s memory. With each successive frame, the ray tracing algorithm updates these lists, ensuring that only the nodes required to be used in the scene (the rest just not being visible or worth using) are stored in the VRAM.

(Image credit: Mark Grossman / Microsoft)

A diagram highlighting the main features of a Microsoft-developed technique, which involves reducing the amount of memory used in ray tracing acceleration structures called BVHs

Note that this system not only reduces the load on the graphics card’s memory and the GPU’s cache, but it also lowers the amount of ray tracing checks that need to be carried out. Rather than having to constantly traverse across the entire BVH structure to see what rays are interacting with which objects, only those in the lists (called a residency and recording map) need to be checked.

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This is important for AMD’s graphics processors because unlike Nvidia’s GPUs, they don’t have any dedicated hardware for accelerating the traversal process. Instead, it’s all handled via compute shaders. Both vendors do have specialised units for testing ray-box and ray-triangle intersections, so they both check these things off very quickly, but RDNA 2 and newer GPUs spend quite a bit of time working through the BVH.

Your next upgrade(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.

Your next upgrade

(Image credit: Future)Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.

(Image credit: Future)

Nvidia RTX 4070 and RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics cards

Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD.Best gaming motherboard: The right boards.Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits.Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest.

Yeah, this is allverycomplicated, and I’m almost certainly over-simplifying it, but the one thing that thebest gaming PCsand consoles have in abundance is compute power. So it makes sense to leverage something that, while involving lots of extra but basic calculations, reduces memory and ray tracing loads.

Although Microsoft’s patent is primarily targeted towards improving ray tracing performance on its Xbox Series X consoles, the technique could be implemented on any platform, as it’s not specific toward any particular hardware. So if you have a mainstream graphics card, like aGeForce RTX 4060orRadeon RX 7600, then you could well have the chance to enjoy ray tracing in a game in the not-too-distant future.

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