Sony and AMD Share First Details on Next-Gen Console Technology

Sony and AMD have started teasing some of the new technologies that will power the successor to the PlayStation 5. In a roughly nine-minute video published on the PlayStation YouTube channel, Mark Cerny, PlayStation 5 Lead Architect, and Jack Huyn, SVP & General Manager of AMD’s Computing and Graphics Group, shared some details on Project Amethyst, a joint effort to overcome current bottlenecks limiting what ray tracing and machine learning can do on current-gen hardware.

Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X|S both come with AMD RDNA2 GPUs capable of ray-tracing capabilities. However, this new rendering technique, designed to realistically simulate the lighting of a scene and its objects, is quite resource-intensive. That’s why there are very few current-gen console games that make great use of ray tracing today, and even without ray tracing, very few games are capable of running at 4K 60 FPS.

With its PlayStation 5 Pro, Sony does offer a 45% faster GPU delivering twice as fast ray tracing performance compared to the standard PS5. The console also introduced PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), a new image upscaling technology allowing more games to run at 60 FPS at a native 4K resolution.

However, to push gaming technology forward, Sony and AMD are working on three new technologies to improve machine learning performance, ray-tracing, and memory bandwidth. The first one, which is related to machine learning, is called neural arrays, and it’s designed to make upscaling technologies like AMD’s FSR more efficient.

“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 denoising technologies together,” Cerny explained.

Next, Sony and AMD are working on Radiance cores, a new dedicated hardware block designed to handle ray tracing and path tracing in real time, freeing up CPU and GPU resources along the way. Lastly, the two companies created a new data compression system for every piece of data headed to memory to reduce memory bandwidth usage.

“Overall, it’s 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 brigning them to a future console in a few years time,” Cerny said in the video. Huyn added that AMD plans to “bring these innovations to developers across every gaming platform,” which suggests that Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox hardware may also benefit from Project Amethyst.