Sony forms alliance with AMD for PlayStation's future, new technologies on the horizon

Sony IE has released a video featuring Mark Cerny, lead architect of PS5 and PS5 Pro, and Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of AMD, sharing a preview of some technologies that will most likely be applied to the Japanese brand's future platforms. The topic is quite complex, but an attempt has been made to condense it into the main points that will guide the development of the next generation of games and facilitate its creators.

It starts with Project Amethyst, a new architecture to optimize machine learning models, with computational units capable of sharing information instead of operating autonomously, creating increasingly larger and more complex neural networks, for greater efficiency and a much more scalable workload than in the past. This is followed by Radiance Cores, hardware blocks dedicated solely to real-time ray tracing and path tracing, which will give the GPU more room to render the scene. Finally, we have "Universal Compression", a new system that processes all incoming data to memory and compresses it according to needs (not just textures), also increasing efficiency with a drastic reduction in memory bandwidth used.

These are all technologies still in their embryonic state, and only exist in simulations, but they seem to promise very interesting benefits for the high-budget game market. Will we actually see concrete improvements in what will be the next next-gen? It's still too early to tell. We leave you with the full video of the chat between Mark Cerny and Jack Huynh.