Sony announces new GPU technology on its next PlayStation

Sony’s next console (presumably the PS6) will arrive in “a few years”, according to someone I believe is making this claim. Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PS5 and PS5 Pro, joined Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Computing and Graphics Group, in a YouTube video in which the two spend nine minutes learning about very specific, co-developed advances in graphics technology that will be coming to the next console. But both men cautioned that the technologies are still “in their early stages” and “only exist in simulation at the moment.”

A lot of this comes down to how companies are working to make it easier for future GPUs to handle graphics scaling, ray tracing, and the highly intensive path tracing techniques used to make game worlds more realistic. Cerny says “the current approach has reached its limits”, which is why Sony is working with AMD to integrate components of its next-generation RDNA architecture into future consoles. AMD’s Huynh introduced Radiance Cores (similar in theory to Nvidia’s RT Cores) which are dedicated to handling ray tracing and path tracing. In addition to Sony’s new consoles sporting new cores, they will almost certainly also be included in AMD’s future desktop GPUs, and likely in anything else it participates in in its Xbox partnership.

The Radiance Cores are supposed to improve performance speed, freeing up other components to quickly process shaders and textures instead of having to spin so many plates, so to speak. This new GPU technology will also benefit from advances in AMD’s Redstone FSR, its latest AI-assisted scaling technology such as Neural Radiance Caching, as well as likely any other scaling technologies that follow.

Another key area of ​​improvement is compression, which will free up more bandwidth for GPUs to run future games at optimal performance and fidelity. Sony is improving the Delta Color Compression technique (used on the PS5 and PS5 Pro) which compresses textures and renders targets. Its next hardware will use the new, more efficient technique called Universal Compression which compresses All in the pipeline. Huynh says this will allow the GPU to deliver “more detail, higher frame rates, and greater efficiency.” Increased compression could raise a GPU’s performance ceiling, which should also allow it to run more efficiently in low-power mode, should the need arise.

Speaking of which, it’s easy to see how these improvements could benefit the PlayStation handheld that’s reportedly in development. Sony and AMD’s work to reduce pressure on GPUs could theoretically apply to any form factor, such as a handheld. Sony has already made strides in efficiency on the PS5, with a new power saving mode that can reduce game performance in favor of lower power consumption. In a nutshell, these are the key ingredients needed to run games on a handheld.

It’s encouraging to see Sony proactively showing how it’s working to make the GPUs in its upcoming devices (whether it’s the PS6 or a handheld) as good as possible. For now, we’ll pretend this news doesn’t cast a shadow over the aging PS5 and the not-as-powerful-as-we-hoped PS5 Pro.