GPU companies, like AMD and Nvidia, spend huge sums of money every year on researching rendering techniques, either to improve the performance of their chips or as part of a future architecture design. One recently approved patent shows that AMD began exploring the use of neural networks in ray tracing at least two years ago, just when the Radeon RX 7000-series was just about to be announced.
Under the inauspicious name of 'United States Patent Application 20250005842', AMD submitted a patent application for neural network-based ray tracing in June 2023, with the rubber stamp of approval hitting in January of this year. The document was unearthed by an Anandtech forum user (via DSOGaming and Reddit) along with a trove of other patents, covering procedures such as BVH (bounding volume hierarchy) traversal based on work items and BVH lossy geometry compression.
