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R&D / Graphics / 2026RESEARCH

Ray Tracing on a Physical PS2 Slim

A ray tracing demonstration running on a physical PlayStation 2 Slim, built directly against the PS2 development and library ecosystem.

PS2 SLIMHardwareVECTOR UNITSMath pipelineRAY TRACERRenderingFRAMEBUFFEROutputTV DISPLAYResult

PROBLEM

How far can ray tracing be pushed on original PlayStation 2 hardware?

APPROACH

Work directly against the PS2 toolchain and vector units rather than an emulator, treating the console's real memory and processing constraints as the design boundary.

ENGINEERING

  • Rendering pipeline built for the PS2's fixed-function and vector-unit architecture
  • Memory budget management on constrained hardware
  • Vector Unit (VU) programming for ray/scene math
  • Performance optimisation under real hardware limits

RESULT

An active hardware R&D project. Full technical writeup and results are published as the work progresses — see the research log for current status.

TECHNOLOGY

PS2 SDKMIPS / VU ASMCRay tracing

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