Notwithstanding the aggressive wording in your question, I would answer this way:
Cerny, more than anyone who is posting in this thread or anyone who speaks publicly about consoles in the industry, knows well the difference between hardware accelerated ray-tracing, and software ray-tracing. As the architect of the system, he would know himself precisely the amount of area and type of hardware accelerated Ray Tracing they support. So I found the *absence* of clarity on this point, particularly coming from him directly, to be extremely telling. Or to put it bluntly: Cerny chose not to be clear on this point and he would know the answer first hand.
Unlike, say, a "junior" (your term) on a marketing team who may not really understand those technical differences and thinks that "ray tracing" is just a buzzword so unintentionally puts it in a headline without the intent to be misleading.
Seems to me that, like 4K before it, both companies will claim they have "Ray Tracing" whether it's supported in silicon or not.
For better or worse, the Scarlett video was clear on this point. Cerny was not. Therefore, if we're being honest we do not know if Sony's implementation is HW accelerated or not.
Lastly, the very next sentence I say that I personally think it's likely they have it.
Thank you for the answer. I try not to sound aggressive, though it is frustrating when someone of your authority comes wading in on the nonsense side of this debate.
In my are of work (programmer), the titles "Lead Developer", "Senior Developer", "Junior Developer" are common and not insulting at all. I wasn't aware this might be insulting in a marketing department context. I meant a staff member under your direct authority, that was new enough they might not know the lay of the land and suggest an outrageous "lie" (technically true).
I think Mark Cerny should be insulted you think he'd - knowing full well the difference, as you say - go out in an interview talking about GPU raytracing capabilities similar to Nvidia RTX (by name!), when he knows it's just plain old GPU compute. I don't think
anyone high up in this industry has the nerve to do that, to be honest. It shocks me that you even consider this a possibility.
I also think you are giving way too much weight to the "clarity" provided by MS. Though my guess is that is because you are aware of their plans, and those plans are not plain old GPU compute. "Hardware accelerated" means very little in this regard. Technically, "hardware accelerated" means "not on the main CPU". Literally anything the GPU does is "hardware acceleration".
I am old enough to remember raytracing on my first computer, a 386SX. This model didn't even do floating point in hardware! You could buy, for no small change, an additional chip to fit in the motherboard - an Intel 80387SX math co-processor. This chip provided hardware accelerated floating point - which I used for raytracing using POV, and my word it made a massive difference. We have had "hardware accelerated" raytracing for a very long time, MS saying those keywords is not exclusionary to just using GPU compute in any way.
