A light has been casted - AMD files patent combining hardware and software for raytracing

Alright, they actually did file that patent a while ago already. It entails a technique to perform real-time ray tracing calculations more efficiently. The methodology is a somewhat hybrid solution that combines hardware and software to calculate faster, without the need for RT cores. Likely the technology was intended with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett in mind.

AMD has announced in a published patent how its proprietary software and hardware solutions are supposed to make raytracing better. It seems like this processor feature could also be included in the Xbox Scarlett and PS5 based on texture processor based ray tracing. As you know, both upcoming consoles will come up with raytracing support. According to the patent, AMD is pursuing a hybrid approach to accelerate ray tracing. Here is an excerpt:

"The hybrid approach (fixed functional acceleration for a single node of the BVH tree) and the use of a shader unit to schedule processing solves the problems with [note: current raytracing solutions] for hardware-based and / or software-only solutions only, while maintaining flexibility because the shader unit can continue to control the overall computation, bypassing the fixed functional hardware as needed while still taking advantage of the performance advantage of the fixed functional hardware, and using the texture processor infrastructure eliminates large buffers for Ray storage and BVH caching, which are typically in a hardware raytracing solution because the existing VGPRs and the texture cache can be used in their place,which saves a lot of space and complexity of the hardware solution. "

This raytracing calculation function of the AMD processor accelerates raytracing calculations.