The penchant for video games to develop better graphical capabilities has been ingrained into development DNA since the first playable games were released decades ago. Fast forward to current times and Microsoft wants to improve the performance on low VRAM GPUs when combined with ray tracing with its new patent, creating a path for wider adoption.
To further the eye-candy arms race, ray tracing has taken a unique position in adding gorgeous realistic lighting, shadows, and depth to many modern games. It comes with one major caveat, with a significant performance penalty in many cases. This drawback is further made worse by GPUs that have a low amount of VRAM available. While NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 4090 handles ray tracing with aplomb with its 24GB of fast GDDR6X VRAM, other GPUs are not so lucky. Path tracing, an even more demanding technology, has recently made headways in games such as Alan Wake 2 for beautiful environments but at a steep performance cost.
For example, even a modern GPU such as the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti with its $399 MSRP will struggle to use ray tracing in many titles due to its 8GB of VRAM. The RTX 4060 Ti with 16GB of VRAM will typically fare better, with more headroom. Couple that with higher resolution such as 1440P or 4K, and VRAM becomes a serious limiting factor.
Microsoft's patent aims to improve ray tracing for GPUs that are limited by memory, so more gamers can use it in modern titles. Mass adoption will also mean more developers will spend time on ray and path tracing, boosting its improvement rate.
Microsoft's patent aims to improve ray tracing performance in VRAM limited scenarios
Microsoft's patent will find a resource saving approach to ray tracing. This is much like when certain textures are reduced in games when visual distances are great in order to reduce the impact on performance. The idea is that visuals which are less important on screen when ray tracing is in effect, will have their quality altered or diminished. The images that are more visible and important to the game experience will then use less memory. This will allow gamers to enjoy ray tracing without as many performance penalties on a variety of hardware, at least in theory.
This could be useful not only in lower VRAM GPUs, but also in console systems which could then take on more ray tracing titles in the long run. Even high-end GPUs with copious VRAM could benefit from aspects of this technology in extreme cases where path tracing is too taxing.
There have been other indirect methods of improving ray tracing performance as well. NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR both aim to take a bite out of overall performance by boosting frame rates, and upscaling lowered resolutions. NVIDIA's DLSS 3 with frame generation, in titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, has been especially useful in keeping ray and path tracing under control.
Microsoft's patent could potentially be a boon to gamers on nearly every platform, by giving ray tracing a more detailed and bespoke set of operation conditions for it to still impress but with less penalty.
