Sony and AMD tease the GPU tech they're building for the next PlayStation

"Over nearly nine minutes, Cerny, who was the lead designer for the PlayStation 4 and PS5, chats with Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Computing and Graphics Group, about a series of technologies, collectively dubbed Project Amethyst, the two companies are developing together. According to Cerny, those technologies "only exist in simulations" right now, but they're broadly designed to make the next PlayStation better at ray tracing, upscaling and other machine learning-based rendering techniques."

"If you know anything about AMD graphics cards, it's that they've historically offered poor ray tracing performance relative to NVIDIA's RTX GPUs. For years, AMD tried to bridge the gap with cards that outmuscled NVIDIA's offerings with better rasterization performance, an approach the company now admits won't work for modern, graphically intensive games. "Trying to brute force [ray-tracing] with raw power alone just doesn't scale," Huynh said. AMD's solution is an entirely new architecture that combines two hardware innovations: Neural Arrays and Radiance Cores."

"In AMD's older GPUs, the individual compute units are designed to work independently of one another. This approach worked great for a long time, but in modern games - dependent as they are on expensive upscaling techniques likes FSR and Sony's own PSSR to deliver playable framerates at high resolutions - it can lead to inefficiencies. AMD is trying to solve that problem with Neural Arrays, which give the compute units a way to work together and share data between one another."

Project Amethyst is a collaboration targeting improved ray tracing, upscaling, and machine-learning rendering for the next PlayStation and future AMD GPUs. The technologies currently exist only in simulations and aim to address modern rendering demands that raw compute power cannot efficiently solve. AMD plans an architecture featuring Neural Arrays to enable compute units to collaborate and share data, and Radiance Cores to enhance ray-tracing workloads. The approach intends to deliver better performance and efficiency for graphically intensive games that rely on advanced upscaling techniques like FSR and Sony's PSSR.

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