Sony and AMD Unveil Next-Gen Console Technology: A Glimpse into the Future of Gaming

AMD and Sony tease new chip architecture ahead of PlayStation 6

It feels like it was just yesterday that Sony hardware architect Mark Cerny was first teasing Sony's "PS4 successor" and its "enhanced ray-tracing capabilities" powered by new AMD chips. Now that we're nearly five full years into the PS5 era, it's time for Sony and AMD to start teasing the new chips that will power what Cerny calls "a future console in a few years' time." In a quick nine-minute video posted Thursday, Cerny sat down with Jack Huynh, the senior VP and general manager of AMD's Computing and Graphics Group, to talk about "Project Amethyst," a co-engineering effort between both companies that was also teased back in July. And while that Project Amethyst hardware currently only exists in the form of a simulation, Cerny said that the "results are quite promising" for a project that's still in the "early days." Mo' ML, fewer problems? Project Amethyst is focused on going beyond traditional rasterization techniques that don't scale well when you try to "brute force that with raw power alone," Huynh said in the video. Instead, the new architecture is focused on more efficient running of the kinds of machine-learning-based neural networks behind AMD's FSR upscaling technology and Sony's similar PSSR system. While that kind of upscaling currently helps let GPUs pump out 4K graphics in real time, Cerny said that the "nature of the GPU fights us here," requiring calculations to be broken up into subproblems to be handled in a somewhat inefficient parallel process by the GPU's individual compute units. To get around this issue, Project Amethyst uses "neural arrays" that let compute units share data and process problems like a "single focused AI engine," Cerny said. While the entire GPU won't be connected in this manner, connecting small sets of compute units like this allows for more scalable shader engines that can "process a large chunk of the screen in one go," Cerny said. That means Project Amethyst will let "more and more of what you see on screen... be touched or enhanced by ML," Huynh added. Let's get efficient Current GPU pipelines also have some inefficiencies when it comes to ray-tracing, Cerny said. The current approach of asking shaders to calculate both ray paths and more traditional texture shading "has reached its limit," he said. To make things more efficient, Project Amethyst builds off a system Sony patented in 2022 with a separate set of "radiance cores." This separate hardware block is designed for and dedicated to the computationally intense process of ray traversal -- figuring out which light rays hit which polygons in a scene. That frees up the CPU and GPU for the more traditional shader calculations based on textures and material data, Cerny said. But the most significant bottleneck that Sony and AMD say they're trying to fix with the new chip has to do with memory bandwidth limitations on the GPU. For a while now, AMD chips have used Delta Color Compression to reduce the size of certain texture data before it goes through the limited pipe. In Project Amethyst, that process is being generalized for a "universal compression" that does the same for everything sent to the GPU. The result will hopefully be an "effective bandwidth [that] exceeds its paper spec," Cerny said. Without even a concept demo of the output to look at, it's way too early to tell just how much extra horsepower this new architecture will be able to squeeze out of silicon that is generally improving more slowly than it used to. But it's still interesting to get a glimpse into what the chipmakers behind PlayStation consider important in the eternal struggle for more detailed and realistic real-time graphics.

AMD and Sony Tease Next-Gen Graphics, Possibly for a PS6

AMD and Sony jointly teased AMD's approach to improving its future graphics hardware performance in a video posted to YouTube this week: compression, aggregation and dedication. Compressing all the data in the graphics pipeline for lower memory overhead, aggregating the compute units that process the data for faster matrix multiplication (key to improving AI performance, including upscaling) and finally adding dedicated silicon to handle ray and path tracing acceleration, necessary to bump up visual quality. Sony's involvement immediately sent everyone's heads into PlayStation 6 rumorspace: AMD's chips power Sony's PlayStation consoles, and that's pretty much the only place where the two companies intersect, at least for the moment. The three new technologies teased in the AMD video are: Radiance Cores: My testing over the years has shown that AMD has long lagged Nvidia with respect to ray tracing performance (which is not just for pretty reflections -- it improves lighting significantly), and that's at least partly because its processing takes place in its main compute unit cores, which are optimized for processing other types of graphics. So ray tracing bogs your frame rates down a lot. And the one-core-one-ray-trace-unit architecture limits the amount of processing you can throw at it to improve. The Radiance Cores handle the ray tracing acceleration separately, similar to the way Nvidia's RT cores do. Neural Array: Matrix multiplication is the key algorithm for accelerating AI processing on-device -- it's what Tensor cores handle, for example -- and these days, upscaling is driven by AI-heavy, machine learning-informed algorithms, like Nvidia's DLSS and Intel's XeSS. Upscaling is important because it's a major way to run at higher resolutions without taking a performance hit, and in many ways is at the center of a suite of technologies for improving image fidelity and performance. AMD's version is FidelityFX Super Resolution, and its next-generation of the technology, FSR Redstone (likely part of RDNA 5), will need those arrays, as well as Sony's variation of it, PSSR. Universal Compression: The less compressed your data is, the more memory it takes to process and the slower it moves through a pipeline. Traditionally, graphics processors have stuck to compressing only the biggest memory hogs, starting with textures, in part because there was a performance cost to inserting it into the processing pipeline. But silicon is so much faster than it used to be that it likely makes sense to use it for all the graphics data, which is how Universal Compression works. Even if performance is a wash, it probably means less memory is required, an important factor for 4K and higher gaming as well as prices. This tease is the first of probably a zillion for both new technologies in the PS6 and AMD's RDNA 5, and I'd expect to hear a lot more about it at CES in January 2026, if not sooner. I've reached out to AMD for more details, but didn't immediately hear back.

Sony and AMD tease likely PlayStation 6 GPU upgrades -- Radiance Cores and a new interconnect for boosting AI rendering performance

Sony is finally spilling the beans on some of the hardware upgrades it will be bringing to its next-generation console. AMD's senior VP and general manager of computing and graphics at AMD, Jack Huynh, and Sony's PS5 Lead Architect, Mark Cerny, published a collaborative video discussing new technologies that are being worked on as part of their collaboration, Project Amethyst. Some of these technologies include massive upgrades to AI rendering and ray tracing performance. The new hardware is likely to be part of the PlayStation 6, or possibly a handheld option. Most of the nine-minute video discussed two new technologies that the two companies are working on together: Neural Arrays and Radiance Cores. Neural Arrays represent an optimization toward the AI-accelerators housed in each compute unit of AMD's modern RDNA architectures, which will network all of the CUs together. This feature will reportedly allow a GPU to process a "large chunk of the screen in one go". The duo didn't go into significant detail about the new technology, but on the surface, Neural Arrays appears to be an "Infinity Fabric" style interconnect that will connect every single compute unit together and allow each compute unit to talk to each other directly without spilling out to cache. One interesting tidbit is that this feature appears to be targeted exclusively toward improving AI-rendering performance, despite the fact that Neural Arrays apparently connects the entirety of each compute unit together (not just the AI portions of the CU). Radiance Cores represent a new dedicated hardware block on a GPU that will reportedly speed up ray-traced rendering significantly and make real-time path-tracing possible. Radiance Cores takes the ray transversal part of the ray tracing pipeline and takes full control of it, processing it independently of the shader cores to speed up rendering time. Memory compression is also getting a big upgrade; AMD and Sony are moving to a new technology called Universal Compression that allows all data types to be compressed "whenever possible". This is a big change from the PS5 series' outgoing compression implementation (Delta Color Compression), which can allegedly only compress certain data elements, including textures and render targets. The introduction of these technologies, particularly Neural Arrays and Radiance Cores, shows that the next-generation Sony console (probably the PS6) will be designed to play ray-traced and path-traced games with equivalent performance to PC graphics card hardware that we have today. Cerny and Huynh also all but confirmed that the next-gen console will take full advantage of FSR Redstone and its suite of machine learning features. The PS5 and PS5 Pro technically have ray-tracing capabilities, but they are noticeably worse than what Nvidia or even AMD's latest GPUs are capable of (especially relating to the vanilla PS5). If you haven't caught on by now, Project Amethyst is the codename for Sony's next-generation console, which will likely be the PS6, but it could potentially include a handheld counterpart as well, as some outlets have speculated. Arguably, the best part is that we can expect all of these technologies to make their way into future AMD graphics cards. Jack Huynh confirmed that the Universal Compression tech will be coming to future AMD SoCs and GPUs. Mark Cerny has also played a role in developing RDNA 5, so it is almost inevitable that Radiance Cores and Neural Arrays will be debuting in AMD's next-generation gaming GPU architecture. Cerny also took a brief moment to tease the timeline of Project Amethyst, noting that these technologies will come to a "future console in a few years' time".

Sony's PlayStation 6 Aims for a Graphics Leap With New Architecture Strategy

When he's not battling bugs and robots in Helldivers 2, Michael is reporting on AI, satellites, cybersecurity, PCs, and tech policy. We're still years away from the PlayStation 6, but Sony says the next-gen console will feature not only a traditional CPU and GPU, but also re-architected hardware to further enhance the graphics with AI and reduce processing bottlenecks. The company revealed the details in a surprise video on Thursday about its work with AMD on Amethyst, a project aimed at harnessing AI approaches to enhance gaming graphics. "Overall, it's still very early days for these technologies; they only exist in simulation right now, but the results are quite promising," Sony's head of PlayStation architecture, Mark Cerny, said in the clip. "And I'm really excited about bringing them to a future console in a few years' time." AMD's general manager for computing graphics, Jack Huynh, said project Amethyst is poised to deliver "gaming breakthroughs." But it will require a new approach to offer "real-time physics, cinematic lighting, [and] efficient asset streaming" for next-generation games. "Trying to brute-force that with raw power alone just doesn't scale," Huynh said. "That's why we're combining traditional rasterization with neural acceleration," or what AMD describes as a collection of machine-learning technologies that can further increase a game's frame rates while maintaining the high resolution and quality visuals. AMD has already been offering the AI gaming boost technologies through FidelityFX Super Resolution, also known as FSR, which has been available on the company's Radeon GPUs for PCs. In addition, FSR 4 is coming to the PlayStation Pro next year, replacing the existing PSSR AI upscaling tech. But gamers can expect even more powerful versions in the coming years, thanks to Amethyst. In the video, Cerny said the challenge with FSR and PSSR is that both "are incredibly demanding on the GPU. They're both computationally expensive and require speedy access to large amounts of memory." In response, AMD and Sony are working on a new GPU architecture involving "Neural Arrays" that promises to further streamline the compute units (CUs) so they can "share data and process things together like a single, focused AI engine," Huynh said. "Now we're not linking the entire GPU into one mega unit. That'd be a cable management nightmare," he added. "But we are connecting CUs within each shader engine in a smart, efficient way. And that changes the game for neural rendering. Bigger ML [machine learning] models, less overhead, more efficiency, and way more scalability as workloads grow." Cerny also said, "neural arrays will allow us to process a large chunk of the screen in one go, and the efficiencies that come from that are going to be a game changer as we begin to develop the next-generation of upscaling and de-noising technologies together." The other notable advancement involves ray tracing, which adds realistic lighting and shadow effects to games. AMD and Sony have also been working on a more efficient approach that involves a dedicated hardware block called "Radiance Cores," which have been designed for "unified light transport," Huynh said. "Radiance Cores take full control of ray traversal, one of the most compute-heavy parts of the process, and that frees up the CPU for geometry and simulation and lets the GPU focus on what it does best: shading and lighting," he added. "The result? A cleaner, faster, and more efficient pipeline built for the next generation of ray-traced games." The final enhancement mentioned is called "Universal Compression," which has been designed to evaluate all data headed to the console's memory and compress it whenever possible, thus freeing up more memory bandwidth. "That means the GPU can deliver more detail, higher frame rates, and greater efficiency," Huynh said.

Sony and AMD tease PlayStation 6 technology, highlight path tracing and machine learning features

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Looking ahead: Prior leaks and rumors regarding the PlayStation 6 primarily focused on AMD's future hardware architectures and their dramatic improvements to ray tracing performance. A brief new presentation from Sony and AMD provides a more in-depth description of next-generation software and hardware techniques - without specifically mentioning the upcoming console. Sony and AMD recently shared a short video in which executives from the two companies describe in-development hardware and rendering techniques. Although Sony has not formally announced the PlayStation 6, the technologies mentioned in the video will likely be crucial for the console and AMD's future PC hardware. Over nearly nine minutes, lead PlayStation architect Mark Cerny and AMD graphics head Jack Huyn explained three new technologies: Neural arrays will enable new machine learning techniques; Radiance Cores will improve ray tracing performance; and Universal Compression will minimize bandwidth usage. Neural Arrays allow a GPU's compute units to work in unison to process AI workloads, minimizing overhead and enabling the use of larger machine learning models. This will likely improve the image quality from AMD's FSR upscaling and the PlayStation 5 Pro's take on the feature, PSSR. Cerny and Huyn also hinted at the possibility of using machine learning for virtualized geometry, a capability that Nvidia introduced with the RTX 50 series graphics cards. It might enhance the efficiency and performance of virtual geometry systems that resemble Unreal Engine 5's Nanite and the micropolygon system Ubisoft introduced in Assassin's Creed Shadows. Moreover, Huyn mentioned ray regeneration, another area where AMD is playing catch-up with Nvidia. The company's answer to Nvidia's ray reconstruction will likely aim to integrate machine learning into the denoising process necessary for ray tracing to provide clear images. To enhance ray tracing and path tracing performance, AMD plans to introduce Radiance Cores, which perform these workloads on specialized hardware blocks. Radiance Cores build on Neural Radiance Caching, a feature AMD previously mentioned while discussing FSR Redstone. The final feature, Universal Compression, builds on the PlayStation 5 Pro's Delta Color Compression to increase the efficiency of data transferred to memory. This will conserve memory bandwidth, which is critical for ray tracing, machine learning, high-resolution textures, and other features. Although Cerny admitted that the new technologies are still undergoing testing, he confirmed that Sony plans to introduce them in "a future console," likely referring to the PlayStation 6. Prior leaks indicate that the next-generation console might arrive in 2027 or early 2028, with a tape-out planned for later this year.

Prepare for a flood of PS6 release date speculation as PS5 lead architect Mark Cerny teases new graphics tech powered by AMD that will come to a 'future console in a few years' time'

Mark Cerny, lead architect of PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro, has shared new developments from Sony and AMD's Project Amethyst collaboration, and in the process, teased the PlayStation 6. In a new video published by PlayStation, titled 'From Project Amethyst to the Future of Play: AMD and Sony Interactive Entertainment's Shared Vision', Cerny, joined by AMD's Jack Huynh, SVP and GM, Computing and Graphics Group, discussed the technology developments from the collaboration. The goal of Project Amethyst, which was announced last year, is to develop machine learning technology across various devices and further graphical capabilities. However, it was Cerny's comments at the end of the video that caught the most attention, as they provide a hint toward what Sony is working on next regarding its hardware. "Overall, it's of course still very early days for these technologies, they only exist in simulation right now. But the results are quite promising and I'm really excited about bringing them to a future console in a few years' time," Cerny said. Could this mean the PS6 is only a few years away? Cerny's words certainly suggest that Sony is at least currently looking into its next console evolution, and has probably confirmed the existence of the next PlayStation itself, which would likely feature the tech developed with Project Amethyst. Speaking of, Cerny and Huynh also revealed three breakthroughs in the video, including Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores, and Universal Compression. Neural Arrays is a new solution for upscaling tech like Sony's PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) and AMD's FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) to be less demanding on the GPU. "Instead of having a bunch of compute units all working on their own, we've built a way for them to team up, to actually share data and process things together like a single, focused AI engine," Huynh explained. "Neural Arrays will allow us to process a large chunk of the screen in one go, and the efficiencies that comes from that are going to be a game changer as we begin to develop the next generation of upscaling and denoising technologies together," Cerny added. Radiance Cores are also designed to minimize the demand of the GPU when ray tracing is involved, which Huynh said is "a new dedicated hardware block designed for unified light transport" to handle both ray tracing and path tracing in real-time. Finally, Universal Compression is a system that evaluates data that goes into the GPU, "not just textures", compressing it and dramatically reducing memory bandwidth usage. "That means the GPU can deliver more detail, higher frame rates, and greater efficiency," Huynh said. We can't be sure when the next Sony console will arrive, but according to recent leaks, the PS6 is expected to launch in late 2027 to early 2028.

Sony and AMD detail their 'gamechanger' for PS6: enhanced ray tracing and memory tech some of which is surely headed to gaming PCs in future

With Sony's PlayStation 6 now only a few years away (according to Sony), we have just received a whole new batch of information on the tech AMD is working on, and it makes me excited for what it will do for PC gamers. Shared to the official PlayStation YouTube account, AMD's senior vice president and general manager, Jack Huynh, had a brief conversation with Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. They talk about future tech for PlayStation and the advancements AMD is making with its RDNA architecture to support that. AMD has been a long-time collaborator with Sony, with the PS4 using an AMD Jaguar CPU, and the PS5 housing an 8-core AMD Zen 2 CPU. Intel was reportedly in the running to develop the PS6's APU, but disputes over profit margins allegedly pushed them out of the competition. Both the PS5 and PS5 Pro are built on RDNA 2 architecture, with the latter landing "somewhere between RDNA 2 and RDNA 3." There are three central updates shared in this presentation. The first is Neural Arrays. As Mark Cerny puts it, this collection of compute units (the compute blocks in an AMD GPU) pushed together to work as a single AI engine will "allow us to process a large chunk of the screen in one go". Cerny says the efficiencies that come from this new tech will be a "gamechanger" when it comes to the future of upscaling and denoising technology. The second new bit of tech is called Radiance Cores. This is a specifically designed hardware block which is intended to handle ray tracing and path tracing in real time. In taking on the job of ray traversal, this frees up the load on the CPU to better work on tasks that CPUs are good at. Huynh says this results in "a cleaner, faster, and more efficient pipeline built for the next generation of ray-traced games." Nvidia cards are generally better at handling ray tracing than AMD ones, and this can be partially attributed to its dedicated RT cores. You can look at Radiance Cores as an attempt to try and bridge this gap. The last new update shared in the latest video is Universal Compression, which is a system that can evaluate and compress all data within a GPU in order to reduce memory bandwidth usage. For the benefit of Universal Compression, Cerny cites "Lower power consumption, higher fidelity assets, and perhaps most importantly, the synergies that Universal Compression has with Neural Arrays and Radiance Cores." Cerny clarifies that all of this technology "only exists in simulation right now, but the results are quite promising" and that he's "really excited about bringing them to a future console in a few years time." Even if you don't particularly care about whatever Sony is up to for its next console generation, AMD working with Sony will be beneficial to the future of AMD as a business. As well as this, PCs and consoles have a symbiotic relationship. The PS5, when it launched, had pretty astounding storage architecture and was a mighty impressive device for its price. The PS5 had AMD tech that wasn't seen elsewhere prior to its release, too. With that in mind, whatever AMD creates for the PS6 will likely make the leap to PC too, potentially in RDNA 5. The custom SoC (system-on-chip) was designed entirely for the device's unique parameters, but PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), Sony's AI upscaling technology built on FSR for PS5 Pro, will have improved FSR elsewhere after launch and vice versa. These advancements would have likely been developed side-by-side and influenced each other. This is before mentioning that Sony's financial support will have helped AMD over the last few decades, too. Cerny ponders "to what degree the effective bandwidth of the GPU will exceed its paper spec", and this is something that consoles need to be very aware of. The finetuning of consoles allows them to crank out performance at a better efficiency, thanks in part to specific accommodations made on the software side. However, if upcoming AMD architecture can get more out of the same tech, the same is likely for the PC side too.

New PlayStation 6 tech all but confirmed by Sony and AMD - and it looks like it'll make its way into other hardware too

Sony and AMD just announced three key technologies that look likely to come to the PlayStation 6 and future AMD graphics cards, with PS5 system architect Mark Cerny and AMD senior vice president Jack Huynh teaming up to deliver the news. The talk is fairly technical, but the three core features - Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores and Universal Compression - look set to make a big impact on future AMD-based hardware and are explained in fairly broad terms that we can summarise here. Let's start with Neural Arrays. In short, this is a new arrangement of the dozens of Compute Units (CUs) that make up a graphics processor like that in the PS5 Pro. Normally each of these CUs work alone on a bite-sized piece of the puzzle, which makes sense for most tasks, but can be inefficient for upscaling techniques like FSR or PSSR. Neural Arrays therefore link multiple CUs together in a "smart, efficient way", like a "single, focused AI engine". The benefit is that this ought to allow for bigger (and therefore higher quality) machine learning models, with less overhead and better scalability. To say it another way, it means that an upscaling algorithm like PSSR ought to run faster at a given quality level, or accomplish more in a given time frame. The same speed-up also applies to denoising algorithms, which are important for ray-traced or path-traced graphics. Huynh also promises that Neural Arrays will allow for new features, including "dedicated innovations that bring cinematic rendering to an entirely new level." Radiance Cores are the second new technology, and they're firmly a hardware change. Essentially, this is a new dedicated hardware block in next-generation AMD graphics processors that's "designed for unified light transport", ie ray tracing and path tracing. In the PC space, Nvidia has long held a ray tracing performance advantage thanks to its RT cores, and it looks like finally AMD is adopting a similar strategy. Just as other dedicated hardware we've seen appear in graphics cards over the years, such as those that deal with media encoding or AI processing, Radiance Cores accomplish their given task faster than doing the same thing on more generic hardware. This speeds up the intensive work of ray traversal - "digging through complex data structures to locate where the millions of rays being cast hit the millions of triangles in the scene geometry". As well as the speed-up from having dedicated hardware, this change also unburdens the CPU and the rest of the GPU - so that they can perform the things they're best suited for, such as simulation and geometry on the CPU and shading and lighting on the GPU. The final bit of tech Sony and AMD announced is called Universal Compression, and thankfully it's a bit easier to explain. In short, it's a system that compresses everything that goes out to GPU memory, rather than just a few data types like textures, as is currently the case on the PS5 and PS5 Pro. Again, this is along similar lines to an existing Nvidia technology, in this case Neural Texture Compression. By adding this compression step, effective GPU memory bandwidth is much higher. That means frame-rates might increase if you're bandwidth-limited, but more importantly it allows for higher-quality assets and reduces power consumption too. This technique has broad positive implications, but it also specifically helps make both Neural Arrays and Radiance Cores more effective. These technologies currently exist only in simulation, according to Cerny, but clearly both parties are confident enough to detail them at this early stage. Huynh also mentions that AMD is aiming to bring the technologies to developers "across every gaming platform", which would follow in the company's general approach of open-sourcing its graphics innovations. It will be fascinating to see how these technologies work when they start to be realised in real hardware, and given the Project Amethyst partnership thus far, it seems reasonable to assume that the two companies will make further announcements over the next few years as the tech gets closer to completion - and when the expected PlayStation 6 is officially announced. Beyond the rumoured PlayStation 6, we could also see these approaches being used in a PlayStation or Windows-based gaming handheld. Power consumption and memory bandwidth limitations are key challenges for any mobile form factor, so no doubt the likes of Valve, Asus and Lenovo would be mighty interested in any significant advancements. Valve has famously said that they're waiting for a "generational leap" to justify a Steam Deck 2, and this might just qualify. Similarly, this is huge news for fans of AMD desktop graphics cards, which have traditionally offered great price to performance in rasterised games and plenty of VRAM, but have fallen behind Nvidia alternatives in terms of RT performance and other features. AMD could massively close the gap here, and that's an exciting prospect. Either way, I'm happy to see Sony and AMD share the fruits of their partnership so openly, and it's certainly food for thought when it comes to seeing how Sony, AMD and other tech giants are looking to circumvent the rise in silicon costs that has prevented faster, cheaper models from arriving this console generation.

Future PlayStation GPUs to Use AMD UDNA Architecture - Project Amethyst for Next-Gen Consoles

AMD and Sony are teaming up again to push console graphics into a new era. In a recent discussion, AMD's Jack Huynh and PlayStation's Mark Cerny introduced Project Amethyst, a joint project focused on using AI and smarter hardware design to make future games look and run better. The goal is simple: combine AMD's chip-building know-how with Sony's deep console experience to get more performance and realism out of every watt of power. They highlighted three main ideas behind the project. The first is Neural Arrays, a way for GPU cores to work together like one big AI engine instead of a bunch of separate units. That makes it easier to run large machine-learning models directly on the GPU, helping with things like neural rendering, AI upscaling, or even smarter NPC behavior. The second is Radiance Cores, dedicated hardware for lighting and ray tracing. These blocks handle complex light paths and reflections in real time, taking the load off the GPU's shading units. The result is faster rendering and more realistic lighting. The third is Universal Compression, which automatically compresses all data heading to memory -- not just textures -- so the system needs less bandwidth while keeping high frame rates and strong visual quality. Right now, these features are still in the testing phase and exist only as software simulations, but they give a good idea of where Sony and AMD are heading. The plan seems to be long-term: more efficient hardware that can support AI workloads as easily as graphics rendering. We already know that Sony will bring AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) to the PlayStation 5 Pro in 2026, which will be the first console to get full support for the new upscaling tech. FSR 4 combines temporal and AI-based upscaling to boost image quality without heavy performance costs. Looking ahead, AMD's next GPU design, called UDNA, is expected to power both future PlayStation and Xbox consoles. Compared to RDNA 4, UDNA should deliver about 20 percent better raster performance per compute unit and up to double the ray-tracing speed. That means more consistent performance, richer lighting, and improved energy efficiency -- exactly what's needed for high-end 4K and even 8K gaming down the line. Overall, Project Amethyst signals how much AI will shape the next generation of consoles. Instead of being just an optional feature, it's becoming part of the GPU's core design. AMD and Sony's partnership suggests that the future of gaming isn't just about faster hardware -- it's about smarter, more adaptive hardware that learns to make games look and feel better in real time. Share this content Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print Core Ultra 300 Panther Lake: Specs, Features, and Launch Timeline ProArt PA401 and PA602 Wood Edition Get New Colorways

AMD and Sony PS6 deep dive - Path Tracing and AI are the future of PlayStation graphics

TL;DR: AMD and Sony's Project Amethyst partnership advances PlayStation hardware with next-gen RDNA 5 architecture, integrating neural rendering, AI, and ray-tracing technologies. This collaboration enhances gaming graphics performance, enabling PlayStation 6 and Radeon GPUs to support path tracing and machine learning for immersive, high-fidelity gaming experiences. AMD and Sony released a new video and presentation ahead of the weekend, detailing some of the latest architectural advancements coming to PlayStation hardware as part of their Project Amethyst partnership. This partnership, which sees Sony's engineers and hardware designers led by Mark Cerny work more closely with AMD to develop graphics hardware for gaming, will also inform AMD's upcoming RDNA 5 generation of Radeon graphics for PCs and other x86 devices. As detailed in the announcement (check out our coverage here for the full scoop), the presentation offered a very high-level overview of how the next generation of PlayStation and Radeon architecture and hardware will work. Setting aside the various revelations, the overall feeling we got was that it's the latest bit of proof that we're on the cusp of a seismic shift (for both PlayStation and Radeon) toward neural rendering, machine learning technologies, and ray-tracing. Looking at AMD's RDNA hardware, including this year's brand-new RDNA 4 architecture, although you've got hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and machine learning or AI capabilities, it feels more tacked on as opposed to a core part of the design. In fact, with the newly announced 'Neural Arrays' and 'Radiance Cores,' it seems AMD is adopting a more NVIDIA and GeForce RTX-like approach, similar to Team Green's Tensor Cores and RT Cores. Although the new RDNA 4-powered flagship gaming GPU, the Radeon RX 9070 XT, offers a sizable boost to overall ray-tracing performance for Radeon graphics cards, it's a different story when you look at Path Tracing or Full Ray Tracing. Path Tracing is essentially ray tracing for everything, including shadows, reflections, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and other lighting effects. It's incredibly hardware-intensive, but it's something that NVIDIA has been working with game developers to deliver since the arrival of the GeForce RTX 40 Series in late 2022. In fact, it's only possible thanks to a wide range of DLSS technologies, AI-powered Frame Generation, and even brand-new neural rendering techniques. This makes it currently "exclusive," so to speak, for the GeForce RTX Series, but that's set to change with the arrival of FSR Redstone and the next generation of AMD and Sony-developed hardware. Path tracing will still be hardware-intensive by the time the PlayStation 6 rolls around, and not something you could brute-force through traditional rendering techniques (aka rasterization) to get 100+ FPS in 4K. Looking at the results in titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle running on a high-end GeForce RTX rig with DLSS, it's no wonder it's viewed as the immediate future for AAA-style gaming. With Sony looking to leverage AI for super resolution or upscaling, frame generation, denoising, and even rendering, the PlayStation 6 is shaping up to be a proper ray-tracing-capable console. It's technology that we'll end up seeing in pretty much all first-party games from the likes of Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Santa Monica Studio, Guerrilla Games, and others. The good news is that with this new hardware coming to PC, alongside first-party PlayStation Studios titles, PC gamers will get to experience the first path-traced God of War and Spider-Man.

Sony just dropped its biggest PS6 news yet and it's all about the GPU | Stuff

The PS6 GPU will push past existing limits to boost upscaling, ray scaling and path tracing. The benefits are tantalising It'll still be "a few years" until Sony releases the PS6, but the company is already spilling the beans about the guts of its next-generation games console. Today, the company is revealing a trio of new, co-developed technologies that will underpin the next-generation AMD graphics cards almost certain to power the PlayStation 6. PS5 system architect (and erstwhile Dana Carvey lookalike) Mark Cerny sat with AMD senior VP Jack Huynh to explain the Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores and Universal Compression tech the companies have developed together. There's a lot of technical terminology within the video, but essentially the pair explain how the raw power approach isn't cutting it anymore and there can be far greater advancements with machine learning (or neural acceleration, as Huynh puts it). Effectively, we're looking at the next generation of the AMD FSR (Fidelity Super Resolution) and PlayStation PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) from the PlayStation 5 Pro technology that'll make the worlds we game in far more realistic and detailed "to get closer to the vision of the artists and creators behind the games." The Neural Arrays tech will see the GPUs compute units team up to become a "single, focused AI engine" to make the graphics chips' workload more efficient and scaleable. There'll be particular benefits for upscaling, ray tracing and denoising technologies Sony and AMD are working on together. Speaking of ray tracing, the Radiance Cores will boost both ray tracing and path tracing capabilities by freeing up GPU components to focus on shaders and textures in real time. Finally, Universal Compression will enable the GPU to deliver "more detail, higher frame rates, and greater efficiency" by compressing everything in the GPUs pipeline. The technologies mentioned are still in the pre-demonstration stage so it's interesting to see Sony and AMD talk so frankly about where this is heading. Overall, though, it makes us incredibly excited for the graphical capabilities of the PS6, whenever that comes around.

PS6 release date speculation soars as PS5 architect Mark Cerny teases "future console" and says "current approach" to lighting and graphics has "reached its limit"

Sony and AMD reveal Project Amethyst tech aimed at next-gen GPU and memory A new tech talk from AMD and Sony has given us a look into the plans for a future PlayStation console - the presumed but unannounced PS6 - as well as AMD's ambitions for next-gen GPUs and machine learning. PS5 and PS5 Pro architect Mark Cerny discusses Project Amethyst, a collaboration between Sony and AMD on "Machine Learning-based technology for graphics and gameplay," with AMD SVP and GM Jack Huynh. The talk focuses on three "gaming technology breakthroughs that will lead to benefits across the gaming industry in the future," but I'll skip to the end a bit first. Cerny says these technologies are "still very early" in development and "only exist in simulation right now," but adds that "the results are quite promising." Here's arguably the most pertinent line in the whole video. "I'm really excited about bringing them to a future console in a few years time," Cerny says of the nascent tech, stopping just short of calling out the PS6 by name, but offering more than enough detail to rekindle PS6 release date speculation, currently centered around 2028. In a previous comment, Cerny specifies that "current GPUs, including the ones in PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 pro" cannot utilize the proposed technologies due to their structure, further hinting at a future console generation. Huynh is quick to say that these technologies will come "to developers across every gaming platform, because this isn't just about silicon," which comes as no surprise given AMD's PC presence. Those technologies can be separated into machine learning and unified GPU architecture, a new "dedicated hardware block" for lighting and ray tracing (or path tracing) dubbed Radiance Cores (which sounds uncannily like a Solar MacGuffin I'd pick up in Destiny 2), and "universal compression" that improves on the DCC (delta color compression) tech used in modern GPUs to conserve memory bandwidth. Wagering that "going forward, more and more of what you see on-screen, the detail, the fidelity, the atmosphere, it will be touched or enhanced" by machine learning, Huynh flags advancements in neural networks already found in upscalers like AMD FSR and the PS5 Pro's PSSR. To overcome inefficiencies in neural networks, Huynh points to "neural arrays," which would allow GPUs to "share data and process things together like a single, focused AI engine" instead of subdividing computation units and problems. "We're not linking the entire GPU into one mega unit," he says, "but we are connecting [computation units] with each shader engine in a smart, efficient way." Neural arrays will lead to "better FSR, better ray regeneration, and brand new [machine learning] power features we're just starting to imagine," Huynh adds. Radiance Cores, meanwhile, seek to address GPU bottlenecks. "The challenge is that the current approach has reached its limit," Cerny says of today's ray tracing and lighting tech. Cerny singles out the shared load of ray tracing and shading work. Huynh, building on AMD's previously announced "Neural Radiance Caching," says Radiance Cores will step in to handle ray traversal (ray tracing and path tracing), which "frees up the CPU for geometry and simulation, and lets the GPU focus on what it does best: shading and lighting." "There's a significant speed boost that comes from putting the traversal logic in hardware," Cerny agrees, "and a further boost that comes from having that hardware operate independently from the shader cores. On top of those performance increases, there are other features in the works, too, such as flexible and efficient data structures for the geometry being ray-traced. "Overall, I'm really looking forward to the time when we can get Radiance Cores into the hands of game creators," he concludes. Finally, universal compression is pitched as a way to check "every piece of data headed to memory, not just textures" and compress it "whenever possible," per Huynh. Where DCC looks at textures and render targets, the proposed UC would evaluate everything, meaning "the GPU can deliver more detail, higher frame rates, and greater efficiency," Huynh says. Cerny ponders "to what degree the effective bandwidth of the GPU will exceed its paper spec" with universal compression implemented. Again, this is all largely in the realm of two tech dudes talking excitedly at a camera, but the proposed technologies and their intersection with the PS6 are noteworthy. The PS6 has been in discussion for some time and has likely been in the works for upwards of four to five years, and folks like Cerny are slowly but steadily helping to visualize it.