Sony just dropped its biggest PS6 news yet and it’s all about the GPU
The PS6 GPU will push past existing limits to boost upscaling, ray scaling and path tracing. The benefits are tantalising
It’ll still be “a few years” until Sony releases the PS6, but the company is already spilling the beans about the guts of its next-generation games console.
Today, the company is revealing a trio of new, co-developed technologies that will underpin the next-generation AMD graphics cards almost certain to power the PlayStation 6.
PS5 system architect (and erstwhile Dana Carvey lookalike) Mark Cerny sat with AMD senior VP Jack Huynh to explain the Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores and Universal Compression tech the companies have developed together.
There’s a lot of technical terminology within the video, but essentially the pair explain how the raw power approach isn’t cutting it anymore and there can be far greater advancements with machine learning (or neural acceleration, as Huynh puts it).
Effectively, we’re looking at the next generation of the AMD FSR (Fidelity Super Resolution) and PlayStation PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution) from the PlayStation 5 Pro technology that’ll make the worlds we game in far more realistic and detailed “to get closer to the vision of the artists and creators behind the games.”
The Neural Arrays tech will see the GPUs compute units team-up to become a “single, focused AI engine” to make the graphics chips’ workload more efficient and scaleable. There’ll be particular benefits for upscaling, ray tracing and denoising technologies Sony and AMD are working on together.
Speaking of ray tracing, the Radiance Cores will boost both ray tracing and path tracing capabilities by freeing up GPU components to focus on shaders and textures in real time.
Finally, Universal Compression will enable the GPU to deliver “more detail, higher frame rates, and greater efficiency” by compressing everything in the GPUs pipeline.
The technologies mentioned are still in the pre-demonstration stage so it’s interesting to see Sony and AMD talk so frankly about where this is heading. Overall, though, it makes us incredibly excited for the graphical capabilities of the PS6, whenever that comes around.
Chris Smith
