Sony And Amd Tease The Gpu Tech They're Building For The Next Playstation

Sony conscionable dropped a caller video pinch Mark Cerny, and it’s a large one, pinch important implications for nan company’s adjacent console and AMD’s early GPUs. Over astir 9 minutes, Cerny, who was nan lead designer for nan PlayStation 4 and PS5, chats pinch Jack Huynh, elder vice president and wide head of AMD’s Computing and Graphics Group, astir a bid of technologies, collectively dubbed Project Amethyst, nan 2 companies are processing together. According to Cerny, those technologies “only beryllium successful simulations” correct now, but they’re broadly designed to make nan adjacent PlayStation amended astatine ray tracing, upscaling and different instrumentality learning-based rendering techniques.

If you cognize thing astir AMD graphics cards, it’s that they’ve historically offered mediocre ray tracing capacity comparative to NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs. For years, AMD tried to span nan spread pinch cards that outmuscled NVIDIA’s offerings pinch amended rasterization performance, an attack nan institution now admits won’t activity for modern, graphically intensive games. “Trying to brute unit [ray-tracing] pinch earthy powerfulness unsocial conscionable doesn’t scale,” Huynh said. AMD’s solution is an wholly caller architecture that combines 2 hardware innovations: Neural Arrays and Radiance Cores.

In AMD’s older GPUs, nan individual compute units are designed to activity independently of 1 another. This attack worked awesome for a agelong time, but successful modern games — limited arsenic they are connected costly upscaling techniques likes FSR and Sony’s ain PSSR to present playable framerates astatine precocious resolutions — it tin lead to inefficiencies. AMD is trying to lick that problem pinch Neural Arrays, which springiness nan compute units a measurement to activity together and stock information betwixt 1 another.

According to Huynh, AMD isn’t linking an full GPU together, arsenic that would create a cable-management nightmare, but it is giving nan silicon a measurement to process a “large chunk” of nan surface successful 1 go. In practice, he says that should let nan adjacent PlayStation and AMD’s early video cards to connection a “whole caller level of instrumentality learning performance.” In turn, that will construe to amended and faster upscaling performance, alongside amended ray regeneration. The second is thing NVIDIA already offers pinch DLSS Ray Reconstruction and successful games that support nan technology, it translates to better-looking ray tracing effects and improved performance.

As for Radiance Cores, it sound for illustration AMD is taking different page from NVIDIA. For nan uninitiated, nan company’s RTX cards characteristic dedicated, fixed-function “RT” cores designed to accelerate nan mathematics needed to simulate ray rays successful real-time. Huynh says nan Radiance Cores are an wholly caller hardware artifact designed to grip ray and way tracing. “It’s a brand-new rendering attack for AMD,” he added. As a bonus, by taking connected this work, nan Radiance Cores will free up different parts of AMD’s caller GPUs to process shaders and textures much quickly, starring to further ratio gains.

Lastly, nan 2 companies are moving connected caller package they’re calling Universal Compression. It builds connected nan PS5 and PS5 Pro’s existing Delta Color Compression technique. It will theoretically let Sony’s adjacent console to compress everything that goes done its graphics pipeline, reducing nan magnitude representation bandwidth needed by nan GPU and perchance reducing its powerfulness consumption.

Again, I’ll statement Cerny said it’s still “early days” for each nan technologies he and Huynh discussed, but it’s reassuring to cognize Sony and AMD are reasoning astir really to champion attack ray tracing capacity and upscaling. Techniques for illustration ray-traced world illumination tin wholly alteration nan look of a game, making for a much immersive experience. If Sony and AMD tin find ways to make those technologies little costly to run, that’s a triumph for everyone.