Sony and AMD's Project Amethyst: Shaping the Future of PlayStation with AI

PlayStation and AMD Talk Next Gen Hardware and Handheld Future

As a Video Producer at CNET, Sean has worked on more videos than he can count. He covers video games and video game hardware along with the occasional electric bike. He covers games both on and off camera, through livestreams, press events, and podcasts. Last week I sat down with executives from PlayStation and AMD to talk about their multiyear collaboration and what they're hoping to achieve on the PlayStation 5 and beyond. During this intimate dinner, I spoke with Mark Cerny, lead architect on PS5 and PS5 Pro at Sony Interactive Entertainment, alongside Jack Huynh, SVP, GM, Computing and Graphics Group at AMD. Sony PR said the conversation wouldn't touch any next-gen console topics but, per our discussion, future and next-generation hardware was a common phrase. It's hard to see how these advancements won't find their way onto a possible PS6 or even a dedicated PlayStation handheld (a standalone, unlike the PlayStation Portal that's tethered to a PS5 console). What is Project Amethyst? Sony and AMD's AI collaboration for gaming The big topic of the dinner was Project Amethyst, which was briefly revealed during a PS5 Pro Technical Seminar late last year. Amethyst's goal, which began development in 2023 when the PS5 Pro was largely complete, is to use AI and machine learning to make games look and run better. Amethyst combines what AMD learned from its RDNA road map with SIE's use of PSSR, or PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, on the PS5 Pro to create a more ideal architecture for machine learning. The aim is to support a wide library of models that will help developers improve their games. "[Amethyst] will support ChatGPT, if that's what the developers want," Cerny said. "That's not what we're working on, we're working [on] networks which know about detail and pixels and edges in order to stretch the capabilities of the hardware as far as possible." Why Amethyst for a codename? It's a combination of PlayStation blue with AMD red, creating Amethyst purple. This synergy was embodied by a 100-pound, split amethyst statue displayed in the corner of our dining room. "Machine learning-based processing is the future," Cerny told me. With Amethyst, Sony and AMD are aiming for "fewer pixels, prettier pixels coupled with machine leaning libraries to increase resolution or add frames or assist in various ways with ray tracing." How machine learning will improve the PS5 Pro and future PlayStation consoles These three aspects are all highlight features of last year's PlayStation 5 Pro, but Sony and AMD are looking to push this further with the help of AI models. For example, developers will be able to render a game at a lower resolution, such as 1080p, and the machine learning hardware will use its super resolution library to scale that up for a 4K image. Since the original is being rendered at a lower resolution and an easier number of pixels to manage, the hardware can run it more smoothly, making games play better at potentially higher framerates. "We at PlayStation were beginning to think about what sort of hardware would be ideal for future consoles and what sort of algorithms would be running on it," Cerny continued "and I'm not talking about immediate needs, we just shipped the PS5 Pro, I'm talking about years in the future." My ears perked up. Cerny has said that each console takes about four years of development. If Amethyst began development in 2023 then we might be seeing a new device, possibly, in 2027. "We knew we had to go with machine learning because Moore's Law is diminishing ... the old school way of adding more performances, more transistors, more flops, more memory bandwidth," Huynh added. Their hope is that machine learning will make these advances more accessible to everyone. This is emphasized by the fact that Amethyst is going to be open for others to use, Cerny continued. "Obviously we want to use these technologies on our consoles, but these technologies are accessible to any of AMD's customers freely," Cerny said. "There's no restrictions on how any of this can be used." It's worth noting that, as recently as last week, Xbox reaffirmed its own partnership with AMD in regards to producing future hardware. Huynh commented a couple times that they're "really trying to find what is the best technology at the most accessible price point." However, each generation of games, both software and hardware, gets more and more expensive. I asked if they believed machine learning would change that pattern, but they, along with AMD's PR, quickly said they aren't talking about price at this time. One of the most exciting aspects of this was, even though they were planning to implement this new software in the coming years, they overachieved. "[We were] looking for an algorithmic breakthrough that we could use way down the road," Cerny said."The joint SIE/AMD team did it in about nine months." The second way they surpassed expectations was that they didn't need future hardware and all that power to run it, Cerny said: "turns out the algorithm could be implemented on current-generation hardware." Co-developed algorithms have already been released by AMD as part of its latest AI upscaling tech, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 on PCs but what is really exciting for console gamers is that Sony is currently in the process of implementing it on PS5 Pro with a launch sometime next year. Cerny cleared up some speculation: "It's not a cut down of the algorithm, it's the full-fat version of the co-developed super resolution." What about PS5 owners? Why these AI upgrades are exclusive to the PS5 Pro To be clear, Amethyst isn't just about increasing the resolution of games with AI. The project's next step is machine learning-based virtual frame generation and ray tracing. PC gamers taking advantage of FSR Redstone will get to see these two other performance increases in the second half of 2025. "Actually this is a little bit different in the approach because what I'm trying to do is prepare for the future, the next generation of consoles," Cerny said. It's clear that AI will play a major role in the next generation of gaming consoles. While PC gamers will be utilizing FSR, Cerny clarified that PlayStation gamers will see "implementations of the algorithm as FSR and implementations of the algorithm as Spectral" which is the brand of machine learning within SIE. "But the fact is they will be extraordinarily close because we want the game developers to have interoperability" Cerny said. It's clear the PS5 Pro will see a boost in performance and their games will look "much crisper," Cerny said -- unfortunately, owners of the base PS5 won't see any of these benefits. "PS5 doesn't have the 300 dots of computational capabilities," Cerny clarified. It's also unclear which features will find their way to the Pro. "Maybe just the super resolution at this point. We have so many algorithms being developed, many of which were not designed with that particular hardware in mind." Cerny went on to mention that the PS5 Pro is capable because it sits around an AMD RTX 9070 or RTX 9070 XT GPU for performance. "From an SIE perspective, we're not looking at the bespoke hardware of the PS5 Pro and so it does complicate the implementation of these algorithms," Cerny said "we're really focused on the future when the co-developed hardware is available." So when will we see the fruits of Sony and AMD's Amethyst? What I needed to know most is: When can I get my hands on this? When will I play a game that uses Project Amethyst? Cerny said that later this year is when developers will be getting an early version of the co-developed network and we should see them publishing sometime next year. "We already have 65 games right now on FSR 4. We committed to 75 games, I think we're ahead of that schedule," Huynh added. And it sounds like it shouldn't be too difficult for developers to make the switch when working on their updates since "it's compatible with FSR3 from an API perspective." A lot of this comes down to the game developers implementing the new software into their games, or patching an older game to take advantage of it. I asked how this will affect older games that may not have an active development scene at the moment. For example, over on the Xbox, older games have automatically gotten frame rate boosts and HDR implementation by simply running on newer hardware, without developer support. "If [developers] do it on their side, the new algorithm is a drop-in replacement for the current PSSR. So if they patch the game, they get the new algorithm. There is still the question of 'does any of that happen automatically' and that's something we're taking a look at," Cerny said. Suffice to say, this is definitely something we'll have to keep our eye on and test when Amethyst begins rolling out. In the meantime, Sony is implementing a team of QA testers to keep an eye on the frames and materials generated by AI models. If frames and pixels are going to be getting produced outside of the developers' hands, they want to make sure things are displaying correctly. "And so that type of stuff we have to train people to look at and see," said Jeff Connell, S3 General Manager, CVP, AMD. "[If] Spider-Man [is] sitting on top of a building and he spins really quickly, we pause it and you look at a building. Are all the windows lined up or are they bowed all over the place? You look at power lines, you look at things like that." Will AI gaming features scale to future PlayStation handhelds? It's still unclear what future hardware we'll actually see all this running on -- the successor to the PS5 remains a mystery -- but one growing trend in the games industry is powerful handhelds. In fact, Xbox announced their close collaboration with ASUS earlier this month when I went hands-on at Summer Game Fest with the ROG Xbox Ally. It's worth noting that Sony doesn't have a current, dedicated gaming handheld on the market. The closest device is the PlayStation Portal from 2023 which can only stream games via a PS5 or the cloud. With Nintendo currently dominating the space with the recently released Switch 2, and Xbox entering it later this year, it seems like only a matter of time before Sony throws its hat in the ring. Another attendee asked whether the Amethyst algorithms are scaled onto weaker, handheld hardware. "The answer is yes," said Cerny. "The algorithms are scalable and so a lot of what we do is we're looking at the possible range of algorithms and how much horsepower we can grow from it, but there are solutions both above and below the ones we're looking at." Handhelds are less of a priority for AMD, Huynh added. "We're focused right now on the desktop because I want to do the desktop right, build that foundation ... and handheld is very important to us too because I believe in continuous gaming, gaming on the go, and we're very focused on handhelds as well."

PlayStation 6? Sony and AMD's Plan to Power Next Gen Consoles With AI

As a Video Producer at CNET, Sean has worked on more videos than he can count. He covers video games and video game hardware along with the occasional electric bike. He covers games both on and off camera, through livestreams, press events, and podcasts. Last week I sat down with executives from PlayStation and AMD to talk about their multiyear collaboration and what they're hoping to achieve on the PlayStation 5 and beyond. During this intimate dinner, I spoke with Mark Cerny, lead architect on PS5 and PS5 Pro at Sony Interactive Entertainment, alongside Jack Huynh, SVP, GM, Computing and Graphics Group at AMD. Sony PR said the conversation wouldn't touch any next-gen console topics but, per our discussion, future and next-generation hardware was a common phrase. It's hard to see how these advancements won't find their way onto a possible PS6 or even a dedicated PlayStation handheld (a standalone, unlike the PlayStation Portal that's tethered to a PS5 console). The big topic of the dinner was Project Amethyst, which was briefly revealed during a PS5 Pro Technical Seminar late last year. Amethyst's goal, which began development in 2023 when the PS5 Pro was largely complete, is to use AI and machine learning to make games look and run better. Amethyst combines what AMD learned from its RDNA road map with SIE's use of PSSR, or PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, on the PS5 Pro to create a more ideal architecture for machine learning. The aim is to support a wide library of models that will help developers improve their games. "[Amethyst] will support ChatGPT, if that's what the developers want," Cerny said. "That's not what we're working on, we're working [on] networks which know about detail and pixels and edges in order to stretch the capabilities of the hardware as far as possible." Why Amethyst for a codename? It's a combination of PlayStation blue with AMD red, creating Amethyst purple. This synergy was embodied by a 100-pound, split amethyst statue displayed in the corner of our dining room. "Machine learning-based processing is the future," Cerny told me. With Amethyst, Sony and AMD are aiming for "fewer pixels, prettier pixels coupled with machine leaning libraries to increase resolution or add frames or assist in various ways with ray tracing." These three aspects are all highlight features of last year's PlayStation 5 Pro, but Sony and AMD are looking to push this further with the help of AI models. For example, developers will be able to render a game at a lower resolution, such as 1080p, and the machine learning hardware will use its super resolution library to scale that up for a 4K image. Since the original is being rendered at a lower resolution and an easier number of pixels to manage, the hardware can run it more smoothly, making games play better at potentially higher framerates. "We at PlayStation were beginning to think about what sort of hardware would be ideal for future consoles and what sort of algorithms would be running on it," Cerny continued "and I'm not talking about immediate needs, we just shipped the PS5 Pro, I'm talking about years in the future." My ears perked up. Cerny has said that each console takes about four years of development. If Amethyst began development in 2023 then we might be seeing a new device, possibly, in 2027. "We knew we had to go with machine learning because Moore's Law is diminishing ... the old school way of adding more performances, more transistors, more flops, more memory bandwidth," Huynh added. Their hope is that machine learning will make these advances more accessible to everyone. This is emphasized by the fact that Amethyst is going to be open for others to use, Cerny continued. "Obviously we want to use these technologies on our consoles, but these technologies are accessible to any of AMD's customers freely," Cerny said. "There's no restrictions on how any of this can be used." It's worth noting that, as recently as last week, Xbox reaffirmed its own partnership with AMD in regards to producing future hardware. Huynh commented a couple times that they're "really trying to find what is the best technology at the most accessible price point." However, each generation of games, both software and hardware, gets more and more expensive. I asked if they believed machine learning would change that pattern, but they, along with AMD's PR, quickly said they aren't talking about price at this time. One of the most exciting aspects of this was, even though they were planning to implement this new software in the coming years, they overachieved. "[We were] looking for an algorithmic breakthrough that we could use way down the road," Cerny said."The joint SIE/AMD team did it in about nine months." The second way they surpassed expectations was that they didn't need future hardware and all that power to run it, Cerny said: "turns out the algorithm could be implemented on current-generation hardware." Co-developed algorithms have already been released by AMD as part of its latest AI upscaling tech, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 on PCs but what is really exciting for console gamers is that Sony is currently in the process of implementing it on PS5 Pro with a launch sometime next year. Cerny cleared up some speculation: "It's not a cut down of the algorithm, it's the full-fat version of the co-developed super resolution." To be clear, Amethyst isn't just about increasing the resolution of games with AI. The project's next step is machine learning-based virtual frame generation and ray tracing. PC gamers taking advantage of FSR Redstone will get to see these two other performance increases in the second half of 2025. "Actually this is a little bit different in the approach because what I'm trying to do is prepare for the future, the next generation of consoles," Cerny said. It's clear that AI will play a major role in the next generation of gaming consoles. While PC gamers will be utilizing FSR, Cerny clarified that PlayStation gamers will see "implementations of the algorithm as FSR and implementations of the algorithm as Spectral" which is the brand of machine learning within SIE. "But the fact is they will be extraordinarily close because we want the game developers to have interoperability" Cerny said. It's clear the PS5 Pro will see a boost in performance and their games will look "much crisper," Cerny said -- unfortunately, owners of the base PS5 won't see any of these benefits. "PS5 doesn't have the 300 dots of computational capabilities," Cerny clarified. It's also unclear which features will find their way to the Pro. "Maybe just the super resolution at this point. We have so many algorithms being developed, many of which were not designed with that particular hardware in mind." Cerny went on to mention that the PS5 Pro is capable because it sits around an AMD RTX 9070 or RTX 9070 XT GPU for performance. "From an SIE perspective, we're not looking at the bespoke hardware of the PS5 Pro and so it does complicate the implementation of these algorithms," Cerny said "we're really focused on the future when the co-developed hardware is available." What I needed to know most is: When can I get my hands on this? When will I play a game that uses Project Amethyst? Cerny said that later this year is when developers will be getting an early version of the co-developed network and we should see them publishing sometime next year. "We already have 65 games right now on FSR 4. We committed to 75 games, I think we're ahead of that schedule," Huynh added. And it sounds like it shouldn't be too difficult for developers to make the switch when working on their updates since "it's compatible with FSR3 from an API perspective." A lot of this comes down to the game developers implementing the new software into their games, or patching an older game to take advantage of it. I asked how this will affect older games that may not have an active development scene at the moment. For example, over on the Xbox, older games have automatically gotten frame rate boosts and HDR implementation by simply running on newer hardware, without developer support. "If [developers] do it on their side, the new algorithm is a drop-in replacement for the current PSSR. So if they patch the game, they get the new algorithm. There is still the question of 'does any of that happen automatically' and that's something we're taking a look at," Cerny said. Suffice to say, this is definitely something we'll have to keep our eye on and test when Amethyst begins rolling out. In the meantime, Sony is implementing a team of QA testers to keep an eye on the frames and materials generated by AI models. If frames and pixels are going to be getting produced outside of the developers' hands, they want to make sure things are displaying correctly. "And so that type of stuff we have to train people to look at and see," said Jeff Connell, S3 General Manager, CVP, AMD. "[If] Spider-Man [is] sitting on top of a building and he spins really quickly, we pause it and you look at a building. Are all the windows lined up or are they bowed all over the place? You look at power lines, you look at things like that." It's still unclear what future hardware we'll actually see all this running on -- the successor to the PS5 remains a mystery -- but one growing trend in the games industry is powerful handhelds. In fact, Xbox announced their close collaboration with ASUS earlier this month when I went hands-on at Summer Game Fest with the ROG Xbox Ally. It's worth noting that Sony doesn't have a current, dedicated gaming handheld on the market. The closest device is the PlayStation Portal from 2023 which can only stream games via a PS5 or the cloud. With Nintendo currently dominating the space with the recently released Switch 2, and Xbox entering it later this year, it seems like only a matter of time before Sony throws its hat in the ring. Another attendee asked whether the Amethyst algorithms are scaled onto weaker, handheld hardware. "The answer is yes," said Cerny. "The algorithms are scalable and so a lot of what we do is we're looking at the possible range of algorithms and how much horsepower we can grow from it, but there are solutions both above and below the ones we're looking at." Handhelds are less of a priority for AMD, Huynh added. "We're focused right now on the desktop because I want to do the desktop right, build that foundation ... and handheld is very important to us too because I believe in continuous gaming, gaming on the go, and we're very focused on handhelds as well."

PlayStation QA team may be the secret to Project Amethyst's quick turnaround

As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. TweakTown may also earn commissions from other affiliate partners at no extra cost to you. PlayStation architect Mark Cerny expected Project Amethyst to take years before bearing fruit, but results started appearing in nine months. This acceleration could be due in part to a team of highly specialized QA testers that studiously evaluated each build. Sony and AMD have partnered to lead the next generation of console chip technology through Project Amethyst, a multi-year initiative aimed at optimizing AI integration into games tech. Both companies are using machine learning (ML) upscaling algorithms in similar ways, with the same general end goal: to squeeze out more in-game performance without degrading graphics and visuals. AMD is building its FSR upscaling technology (now up to FSR 4), and Sony has PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR). Project Amethyst is going so well that Sony is implementing its console-ready FSR 4 analog--a souped-up version of PSSR--onto the PS5 Pro in 2026. The quick turnaround was apparently influenced by AMD, who, as per Tom's Guide, prompted Sony to create a custom quality assurance (QA) team to analyze the output of each new PSSR algorithm. This team would determine whether or not the image quality generated by the successive PSSR iterations actually looked better than its predecessor. "This was news to us. We did not have this at SIE; it really hadn't occurred to us. And it turns out to be vital," Mark Cerny told Tom's Guide, speaking about Project Amethyst's QA team. The results of the in-house testing are used to inform AMD on how to better shape and build the chips of tomorrow's consoles like the PlayStation 6. "AMD is moving extremely quickly. What I'm trying to do is prepare for the next generation of consoles, so my time-frame is multi-year here," Cerny says. Microsoft is also working closely with AMD to build its next-generation Xbox console hardware, as well as a multi-device lineup of chips. The partnership includes APU chips for consoles, handhelds, and cloud devices, further underlining Microsoft's focus on cross-platform content delivery. Here's what Mark Cerny has said about Project Amethyst during the PS5 Pro technical seminar posted by Sony in 2024: ML use in games shouldn't and can't be restricted to graphics libraries. We're also working towards a democratization of machine learning something accessible that allows direct work in AI and ML by game developers both for graphics and for gameplay. Amethyst is not about proprietary technology for PlayStation. In fact it's the exact opposite. Through this technology collaboration we're looking to support broad work and machine learning across a variety of devices. The other goal is to develop, in parallel, a set of high-quality CNNs for game graphics. Both SIE and AMD will independently have the ability to draw from this collection of network architectures and training strategies, and these components should be key in increasing the richness of game graphics as well as enabling more extensive use of ray-tracing and path-tracing.

Sony is designing 'big chunks' of AMD's next-gen Radeon architecture for the PlayStation 6

Sony's Mark Cerny has confirmed that it's driving a lot of the development and features of AMD's next generation Radeon architecture. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. TweakTown may also earn commissions from other affiliate partners at no extra cost to you. Sony has a long-standing partnership with AMD, which supplies and develops custom CPU and GPU hardware for PlayStation consoles. Late last year, Sony announced 'Project Amethyst,' a closer partnership that would jointly develop next-gen hardware and AI architecture for the PlayStation 6. This partnership builds on Sony's custom work, which includes new AI hardware and tools, such as PSSR upscaling, that it developed for the PlayStation 5 Pro. Although the new initiative was only announced last year, we already know that AMD's new AI-powered FSR 4 for its RDNA 4 generation of Radeon RX 9000 Series graphics was developed as part of 'Project Amethyst.' That's only the beginning, as we've now learned that Sony is driving significant components of AMD's next-generation Radeon architecture development. In a new interview with PlayStation system architect Mark Cerny over at Tom's Guide, he confirms that "big chunks" of AMD's next-gen gaming architecture are "coming out of engineering I am doing on the project." "Big chunks of RDNA 5, or whatever AMD ends up calling it, are coming out of engineering I am doing on the project," Mark Cerny said. "And again, this is coming out of trying to move things forward. There are no restrictions on the way any of it can be used." The benefit for PC gamers, of course, is that these technologies will be integrated into the next generation of Radeon GPUs for desktop, mobile, and integrated graphics. As highlighted by Mark Cerny, there are no restrictions on how any of it will be used, including on next-generation Xbox hardware. The naming confusion in Mark Cerny's quote stems from AMD's decision to ditch the RDNA branding for its new unified UDNA architecture, which will encompass both gaming and workstation/AI GPU products. Interestingly, even though the PlayStation 6 hasn't been formally announced, the fact that 'Project Amethyst' is already benefiting Radeon gamers on PC means that we're already starting to hear about new tech that will be part of the PS6. AMD's recently announced FSR Redstone project for FSR 4 and RDNA 4 GPUs indicates that AI-powered Frame Generation, Ray Regeneration, and Neural Radiance Caching are all coming to the PS6 to enhance real-time ray-tracing and path-tracing performance. As seen with several GeForce RTX generations of hardware from NVIDIA, AI is going to define the next decade of gaming, from upscaling with FSR and DLSS through to AI-enhanced rendering, texture compression, neural shaders, and more.

What does Project Amethyst mean for the PS6?

With PS5 Pro out for over six months now and vague details of the next Xbox emerging, speculation is inevitably turning what Sony will do next. Presumably, there will be a PlayStation 6. But for now, all we really know about Sony's vision for future hardware is that it's working with GPU-maker AMD on an AI collaboration called Project Amethyst. What is Project Amethyst and what does it mean for PS6 and future PlayStation consoles? Sony isn't revealing much about its hardware, but it is talking about the AI tech (also see our pick of the best games consoles). Revealed in a PS5 Pro technical seminar last year, Project Amethyst began in 2023 and focuses on using AI to enhance game visuals and performance. The codename refers to the combination of brand colours: PlayStation's blue and AMD red to create purple (don't start with the argument that purple doesn't exist). Although Amethyst's algorithms will be available for all AMD customers - and AMD has already released FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) for PCs, Sony sees the project an important part of its own hardware development for future consoles. The aims include improved AI upscaling, equivalent to Nvidia's DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction, virtual frame generation and ray tracing and support for multiple models to help developers improve games. With upscaling, the tech will allow developers to render a game at a lower resolution for improved performance at higher framerates, with machine learning hardware will using a super resolution library to scale that to 4K. Mark Cerny, lead architect on PS5 and PS5 Pro at Sony Interactive Entertainment, recently told our sister site Tom's Guide, that FSR 4 will come to PS5 Pro next year as a "drop-in replacement" for the current PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution. It seems that it may be limited to increased resolution for now, unlike PCs using FSR Redstone. That's because the PS5 Pro's bespoke hardware complicates the implementation. But Sony looking towards a future when co-developed hardware is available. What does that mean for PS6 or other future PlayStation consoles? If each console takes around four years to develop and Amethyst began in 2023, we could see a new device as soon as 2027. And it seems that the focus from the start will be on using AI to allow it to punch above its weight. CNET quotes Jack Huynh, SVP, GM, Computing and Graphics Group at AMD, as saying: "We knew we had to go with machine learning because Moore's Law is diminishing ... the old school way of adding more performances, more transistors, more flops, more memory bandwidth." But there's no clarity on what the next PlayStation hardware could look like. However, CNET notes the trend for powerful handhelds. Xbox revealed its ROG Xbox Ally, a collaboration with ASUS just last month. Sony doesn't currently have a handheld of its own, but surely it won't allow Nintendo Switch 2 and the upcoming Xbox handheld to battle it out between the two of them? While Cerny said he wouldn't discuss new hardware, he did tell CNET that Project Amethyst's algorithms are scalable, while Huynh added that handheld is important for AMD too. "I believe in continuous gaming, gaming on the go," he said. As for PS6, the only thing I can hope for is that perhaps the shift in focus to driving performance via AI rather than increasingly powerful physical components could finally bring a halt to the the ever rising price tag for newest-gen consoles. What do you think? Shall we wait, or should owners of base PS5 upgrade to the PS5 Pro to benefit from FSR 4? Let us know what you think, and what want to see in the PS6 in the comments below.

The PlayStation 6 Will Probably Be Powered By AI - IGN

It's hard to look at the current-generation gaming hardware and not feel like we're in the quiet before the storm. Because while the PS5 Pro just came out last year, and Microsoft just had a vague tease of its next consoles, it still feels like we're sitting at the end of a generation. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. We got a chance to sit down with Mark Cerny, lead architect for the PS5 and PS5 Pro, and Jack Huynh, AMD's SVP for Computing and Graphics, to talk about graphics tech. While they wouldn't go so far as confirming the PS6 is on the way, they're definitely thinking about it. Either way, we can't talk about graphics technology in consoles without acknowledging where things are for graphics cards - because a lot has changed since the PS5 came out back in 2020, thanks to AI. It's an interesting time to think about future graphics technology. We're fresh off of both Nvidia Blackwell and AMD RDNA 4 cards hitting the market earlier this year, and while both of these graphics architectures are very powerful, raw performance improvements have been lackluster. For instance, even though the Nvidia RTX 5090 now consumes up to 580W, up from 450W from the RTX 4090, my testing only showed an improvement of around 10-25% in most games. That's definitely better, but not the substantial GPU performance improvement we've come to expect every couple of years. AMD fared a little better, with the RX 9070 XT being about 17% faster than the RX 7900 XT, but at a lower price - though that lower price didn't last long before retailers jacked it up. I've talked to both AMD and Nvidia about this, and both manufacturers tell me the same thing: It's getting harder to shrink the manufacturing process and add more transistors, so software is the way to improve performance. Both GPU manufacturers are leaning heavily into their software suites. With the RTX 5090, Nvidia launched its DLSS 4 software suite, which was headlined by the controversial Multi-Frame Generation, or MFG. Likewise, AMD debuted the RX 9070 XT with FSR 4, which implemented AI-powered upscaling for the first time in an AMD GPU, along with improved frame generation. Love it or hate it, frame generation is now a standard feature for graphics hardware. It's not hard to see the appeal, after all. With the click of a button, you can get your graphics card to introduce AI-generated frames to provide a higher frame rate, and who doesn't want more frames? Like most things, though, there's a catch. Frame Generation essentially works by holding a frame in the render queue while an interpolated frame is inserted between the "real" frames. This can introduce visual artifacts, but the bigger problem is that it necessarily adds latency. These are both huge issues, but they can both be improved by having a higher starting frame rate. As such, I wouldn't recommend enabling frame generation unless you're already getting 45-60fps before frame generation. It's easy to take that advice and run with it if you're installing one of these GPUs into a gaming PC, but the next generation of consoles will likely be running on GPUs that will support frame generation, and gamers will likely have much less control over what features they're going to use. The PS5 Pro has already broken the seal on implementing AI in console hardware. That mid-generation console introduced PSSR, or Playstation Spectral Super Resolution, Sony's version of AI-powered upscaling. That was just the beginning, though. Cerny has already come out and said that PSSR was the beginning of what would become Project Amethyst - a partnership with AMD to make game graphics better for everyone, which would of course include Microsoft. You see, PSSR could only do so much on the limited hardware of the PS5 Pro. Because it needed to maintain compatibility with current-generation PS5 games, the GPU is still largely using RDNA 2 - though certain elements of RDNA 4 were added to assist with AI performance. Still, most of the work of PSSR is still done locally on the shader core rather than being handed off to a Tensor unit or other sort of AI accelerator. That won't be the case on the next generation of consoles. According to Cerny, AMD and Sony have co-developed a new algorithm for AI-based upscaling, which is reportedly what the upcoming FSR Redstone, announced at Computex 2025, is at least partially based on. We haven't seen this new algorithm in person, but it sure sounds like when DLSS 4 changed Nvidia's AI upscaling algorithm to a Transformer Model, instead of a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network). This new co-developed algorithm is intended to make upscaled games look sharper than they do now, and Team Green's Transformer model is actually pretty good at what it does. What's more, AMD's Jack Huynh let slip that the "machine learning acceleration hardware [we're] co-engineering on RDNA 5, our next generation, is a direct outcome of the collaboration we're doing." We didn't even know the next AMD GPU generation would be called RDNA 5 until now, let alone that Sony's collaboration helped to engineer it. Neither Cerny or Huynh would confirm that RDNA 5 "or whatever it will be called" would be what's actually powering the next-generation PlayStation, but why wouldn't it at this point? Even if the PS6 is built on RDNA 4, it's going to have access to the same AI accelerator cores that allow the RX 9070 XT to use AI upscaling. But Sony isn't interested in limiting developers to just upscaling. Cerny himself said that "this will support ChatGPT, if that's what the developers want," even if that's not what Sony is actually focusing on. Instead, Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is focused on making graphics technology better, but of course that would include frame generation. Right now, AI is inherently controversial, but when it comes to graphics technology it offers a tempting opportunity for platform makers. After all, it allows drastic improvements to image quality without the raw performance that would otherwise be necessary. Instead, you can just render at a lower resolution, and then use AI to speed up rendering. While AI models are computationally intense, it takes much less work to have your GPU upscale an image to a higher resolution than to render all those pixels the old-fashioned way. Frame generation takes that concept to another level, adding entirely new frames to the render queue. You can argue that these frames are artificial, and you wouldn't even be wrong, but that doesn't mean this tech isn't coming to the PlayStation 6 - if that is indeed what Sony's next-generation console is called. But at least it sounds like it won't be all-encompassing, at least not to start with. When we asked Cerny about whether frame generation was coming to the next-gen hardware, despite needing a high frame rate to begin with, he told us that ultimately it comes down to player choice. "[SIE] can support a high frame rate by having a lower resolution render and more aggressive super resolution," he said. "We can also support a high frame rate by using frame generation. And once that choice is out there, Sony can learn more about what gamers want." It's not the best answer, but it does sound like Sony is going to ultimately leave the option of using frame generation up to the developers. "We provide tools for developers," Cerny said. Neither of the next-generation consoles have been announced yet - unless you count the Switch 2 - so we know very little about what they're going to look like, let alone what AI features they'll support. But if all of the controversial AI features are coming to consoles, then the console makers are going to need to implement some kind of guardrails to ensure a good experience. Because, while Nvidia and AMD are shoving software features into a high-end graphics card and letting everyone else figure out what they want to enable, consoles by their very nature are much less customizable. If frame generation is going to be a major PS6 feature, it needs to be optional on the user-side. I'm worried that if developers can just enable it on the back-end, we're going to get a lot of "60fps" games that feel a lot like 30fps when you sit down to play them.