Sony Interactive Entertainment and AMD dropped a major update to their Project Amethyst collaboration (originally unveiled in December 2024) this past week in a video featuring PlayStation Lead Architect Mark Cerny and AMD SVP and GM of the Computing and Graphics Group Jack Huynh. The duo presented three major new features, Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores, and Universal Compression, which will be coming to future AMD GPUs and consoles like Sony's PlayStation 6.
The video was only about nine minutes long, though, and inevitably left viewers with plenty of questions. Thankfully, the folks from Digital Foundry got a few answers from Mark Cerny via an email Q&A and posted them in their latest video, where they also discussed the aforementioned features.
Firstly, when asked about the change in Sony's hardware and software strategy from the PlayStation 5 Pro to the next PlayStation console, Mark Cerny said Project Amethyst would bring about a monumental shift:
We've shifted our focus substantially. In the past, we were largely creating custom technologies just for PlayStation platforms. But now with Project Amethyst, we're placing substantially more of a focus on co-engineering and co-development with AMD on their roadmap hardware and libraries. That change will have a very large impact, because when developers can create their technology with the understanding that it will work across multiple platforms such as desktops, laptops, consoles, etc., there will be much larger pickup of new features. So I believe we'll see outsized impact from the technologies announced this past week!
Having said that, the PlayStation Lead Architect also admitted that any sort of quantification of the benefits brought by technologies like Universal Compression and Radiance Cores will have to wait until game developers actually implement them in their engines (when it comes to the former) or have access to the new hardware (when it comes to the latter).
With these technologies, we know that great stuff is coming but it’s difficult (or impossible) to quantify. For Universal Compression, I have high hopes for synergies with ML, for example, FSR and PSSR are recurrent neural networks that write feature maps to system memory - how well will those feature maps compress? Radiance Cores are similar, they are obviously a great way to do the processing, but I suspect we'Il need to get prototypes into the hands of game developers to understand the degree to which they will be able to “level up their engines.
Indeed, in the video announcement, Mark Cerny had stressed that all these features 'only exist in simulation right now', meaning it will take time before developers get to play with them.
The PlayStation Lead Architect also shared a couple more interesting tidbits in the email exchange with Digital Foundry. First, he agreed that Universal Compression is particularly important because it's becoming increasingly complex to achieve significant memory bandwidth increases from generation to generation. Secondly, he confirmed that Sony (and, by extension, AMD) is particularly interested in boosting machine learning and ray tracing for their next hardware compared to regular rasterization, which will get some improvements 'where possible' but is clearly not the focus anymore.
This ties nicely with the PlayStation 6 specs rumor that mentioned 'only' a 2.5x to 3x rasterization improvement from the PlayStation 5, whereas ray tracing would be 6x to 12x faster in the new console (which, according to leaker Kepler, Sony plans to launch in 2027).
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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