Sony teases new GPU technology coming to its next PlayStation console

Sony’s next console (presumably the PS6) will be coming in “a few years,” according to someone who I think will make that claim. Mark Cerny, lead engineer on PS5 and PS5 Pro, joined Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Compute and Graphics Group, on YouTube video The duo spends nine minutes reviewing some very specific, jointly developed advancements in graphics technology that will be coming to the next console. But they cautioned that the technology is still in its “early days” and “only exists in simulation at the moment.”

A lot of it boils down to how companies are working to make future GPUs easier to handle with upscaled graphics, ray tracing, and ultra-dense path tracing techniques used to make game worlds look more realistic. “The current approach has reached its limit,” Cerny says, so Sony is working with AMD to integrate next-generation RDNA architecture components into future consoles. AMD’s Huynh provided Radiance Cores (conceptually similar to Nvidia’s RT Cores) dedicated to handling ray tracing and path tracing. In addition to Sony’s new consoles featuring the new cores, they will almost certainly be integrated into future AMD desktop GPUs as well, and will likely be within whatever they help them do. Xbox partnership.

Radiance Cores are supposed to provide a boost in performance speed, freeing up other components to quickly process shaders and textures instead of having to spin up multiple panels, so to speak. This new GPU technology will also benefit from advances in AMD FSR Redstonethe latest AI-powered upscaling technology, like Neural Radiance Caching, as well as any upscaling technology that comes after that.

Another major area of ​​improvement is compression, which will free up more GPU bandwidth to run future games at peak performance and resolution. Sony is improving Delta Color Compression technology (used in the PS5 and PS5 Pro) that compresses textures and exposes subjects. Its next devices will use a new, more efficient technology called universal compression that applies pressure Everything In the pipeline. This will allow the GPU to deliver “more detail, higher frame rates, and greater efficiency,” Huynh says. More stress can push the GPU’s performance ceiling, so you should also allow it to run more efficiently in low power mode, if the need arises.

Speaking of which, it’s easy to see how these improvements could help PlayStation Portable rumored This is allegedly in development. Sony and AMD’s work to reduce stress on GPUs could theoretically be applied to any form factor, such as a handheld device. Sony has already made big strides in efficiency on the PS5, with New power saving mode Which can reduce game performance in favor of lower power consumption. In short, these are the basic components needed to run games on a mobile device.

It’s encouraging to see Sony being proactive about showing how it’s working to make the GPUs in its upcoming devices (be it PS6 or handheld) as capable as possible. For now, we’ll pretend this news doesn’t cast a pall over the old PS5 and the PS5 console Not as powerful as we had hoped for the PS5 Pro.