Sony and AMD are teasing the GPU technology they’re building for the next PlayStation

Sony just released a new video with Mark Cerny, and it’s a big one, and it has big implications for the company’s next console and future GPUs from AMD. Over the course of nearly nine minutes, Cerny, who was the lead designer of the PlayStation 4 and… PS5speaks with Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Computing and Graphics Group, about a series of technologies, collectively called Project Amethyst, that the two companies are developing together. According to Cerny, these technologies “only exist in simulations” at the moment, but are broadly designed to make the next PlayStation better at ray tracing, scaling, and other machine learning-based display technologies.

If you know anything about AMD graphics cards, it’s that they have historically provided poor ray tracing performance compared to NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. For years, AMD has tried to bridge the gap with cards that outperform NVIDIA’s offerings with better rasterization performance, an approach the company now admits won’t work for modern, graphics-intensive games. “Trying to brute force (ray tracing) using raw force alone cannot scale,” Huynh said. AMD’s solution is a completely new architecture that combines two hardware innovations: neural arrays and radiation cores.

In older AMD GPUs, the individual compute units were designed to operate independently of each other. This approach has worked great for a long time, but in modern games — it relies on expensive upgrade technologies Sony’s FSR and PSSR To deliver playable frame rates at high resolutions – this can lead to inefficiency. AMD is trying to solve this problem with neural arrays, which give computing units a way to work together and share data between each other.

According to Huynh, AMD isn’t linking the entire GPU together, as that would create a cable management nightmare, but it is giving the silicon a way to address a “large portion” of the display in one go. In practical terms, he says, this would allow future PlayStation and AMD video cards to deliver “a whole new level of machine learning performance.” This in turn will translate into better and faster upgrade performance, along with better ray regeneration. The latter is something NVIDIA already offers with DLSS Ray Reconstruction and in games that support this technology, it translates to better-looking ray tracing effects and improved performance.

As for Radiance Cores, it looks like AMD will be taking another page from NVIDIA. For starters, the company’s RTX cards feature dedicated, fixed-function “RT” cores designed to speed up the calculations needed to simulate real-time light rays. Huynh says Radiance Cores are an entirely new hardware block designed to handle ray tracing and trajectory. “It’s a completely new display style for AMD,” he added. As a bonus, by doing this work, the Radiance Cores will free up other parts of AMD’s new GPUs to process shaders and textures more quickly, leading to further efficiency gains.

Finally, the two companies are working on a new program they call Universal Compression. It’s based on the Delta Color Compression technology found in the PS5 and PS5 Pro. It would theoretically allow Sony’s next console to compress everything that passes through its graphics pipeline, reducing the amount of memory bandwidth the GPU needs and potentially reducing its power consumption.

Again, I’d like to point out that Cerny said it’s still early days for all the technologies he and Huynh discussed, but it’s reassuring to know that Sony and AMD are thinking about how best to address and advance ray tracing performance. Technologies like ray-traced global lighting can completely change the look of the game, providing a more immersive experience. If Sony and AMD can find ways to make these technologies less expensive to operate, it’s a win-win.