According to the lead internal designer at PlayStation, the impact of the collaboration with AMD cannot yet be assessed.

Sony Interactive Entertainment and AMD this week detailed their Project Amethyst collaboration (originally introduced last December) in a new video featuring Mark Cerny, PlayStation’s lead system architect, and Jack Huynh, AMD’s senior vice president and general manager for computing and graphics. The duo unveiled three major innovations—Neural Array, Radiance Core, and Universal Compression—that will be implemented in future AMD GPUs and consoles, including the upcoming PlayStation 6. Digital Foundry followed up with Cerny via email, and those questions and answers are covered in the video below.

When asked about the evolution of Sony’s hardware and software strategy from the PlayStation 5 Pro to its next-generation console, Cerny said that Project Amethyst would represent a monumental leap forward. He acknowledged that the tangible benefits of technologies like Universal Compression and Radiance Core would only become clear once game developers integrate them into their engines or gain access to the new hardware.

“We’ve shifted our focus substantially. In the past, we primarily created custom technologies for PlayStation platforms. Now, with Project Amethyst, we’re putting far greater emphasis on co-designing and co-developing with AMD according to their hardware and library development roadmap. This shift will have a huge impact, because when developers can create their technology to function seamlessly across multiple platforms—PCs, laptops, and consoles alike—these new features will see far wider adoption. I believe the technologies announced last week will have an enormous impact!” Cerny said.

“We know that great things are coming, but it’s difficult—or impossible—to quantify them. I have high hopes for the synergies between Universal Compression and machine learning. For instance, FSR and PSSR are recurrent neural networks that write feature maps into system memory—how well will those maps compress? Radiance Cores are similar: an outstanding way to handle processing, but I suspect we’ll need to provide developers with prototypes to truly understand how far they can ‘level up their engines.’”

All of these features currently exist only in simulation, meaning developers will need time before they can experiment with them in practice. Cerny agreed that Universal Compression is particularly significant, as increasing memory bandwidth has become more challenging with each hardware generation. He confirmed that Sony—and by extension AMD—is particularly focused on advancing machine learning and ray tracing capabilities in its next hardware, compared to traditional rasterization, which will still receive some improvements but is no longer the central priority.

Source: WCCFTech