It's been almost five years since the PlayStation 5 was released. Just accept it. By Sony's own standards, it's already nearing the end of its life cycle. We can be sure that Mark Cerny and the gang are gearing up for the next generation of consoles, and we've already gotten a few hints about what that could mean. However, Sony has not officially commented on this so far.
No, the PlayStation 6 hasn't been announced yet, but Cerny has started discussing the technology just as he did before the PS5 announcement. In a recently released video, Jack Huynh, AMD's senior vice president and general manager of computer graphics, sat down with the PS5's chief architect for a conversation about the future of gaming and technological collaboration between the two companies. During the conversation, Cerny talks about bringing this technology to “future consoles in a few years.”
Sony and AMD discuss possible PS6 technology
Like everything else Cerny-related, the talk was very technical, covering three key innovations for the future of gaming technology: Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores, and Universal Compression. Although this may sound like gibberish to a layman like me, Cerny and Huynh discussed what this could mean for the future of the video game industry.
Let me break them down for you. Starting with Neural Arrays, the goal of the technology is to improve upscaling techniques such as FSR and PSSR. The new linked arrangement of computing units allows them to work together as a single unit, rather than each unit working on a single part of the program. “We put together a team and built a way to actually share data and process it together like one focused AI engine,” Huynh explained. This makes the entire process much more efficient.
Next up are Radiance Cores, which aim to improve ray tracing technology. This is a new piece of hardware for AMD graphics cards that is solely dedicated to ray tracing processing. This not only improves ray tracing, but also frees up the GPU's CPU for other functions. If this works as intended, there is no need to turn off ray tracing in your game for better performance.
Lastly, Universal Compression sounds like something out of a Silicon Valley TV show and does much the same thing. The technology “directs all pieces of data, not just textures, into memory and compresses them whenever possible.” Rather than just compressing textures, this technique allows you to compress all data.
This explanation is very simple, so I recommend watching the video if you want to know all the details. Currently, these technologies only exist in simulations, but Sony and AMD wouldn't have released them if they weren't confident they could crack them for next-gen consoles.
- brand
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sony
- original release date
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November 12, 2020
- Original MSRP (USD)
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$499, €499, £449, ¥49,980 (standard) // $399, €399, £359, ¥39,980 (digital),
- operating system
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Orbis OS
- processor
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Custom 8-core AMD Zen 2
- solve
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720p – 8K
