- Sony and AMD tease a new GPU technology for Sony's upcoming console, the PS6.
- AMD revealed Radiance Cores, which can free up other components to quickly process shaders and give a performance boost.
- Sony's Mark Cerny mentioned that the PS6 is coming "in a few years time" and the Radiance Cores will power it.
Mark Cerny, the lead architect of PS5 and PS5 Pro, and Jack Huynh, the SVP and GM of AMD’s computing and graphics group, recently sat down to discuss the future of GPUs and technology for Sony’s upcoming console, aka the PS6.
In a nine-minute-long YouTube video, Huynh introduced AMD’s next-gen RDNA architecture, which uses Radiance Cores that are dedicated to handling ray tracing and path tracing, for future consoles.
Sony and AMD’s New Radiance Cores are a Game Changer
This next-gen GPU technology will be integrated into Sony’s next-gen consoles, which is likely going to start with the PlayStation 6. Also, you can expect to see the same technology in other AMD hardware, including their future desktop GPUs. The Radiance Cores are a new dedicated hardware block designed for unified light transport, handling Ray Tracing and Path Tracing in real time.
The YouTube video goes into detail, revealing that the Radiance Cores take full control of ray traversal and can free up other components to quickly process shaders, instead of spinning so many plates, leading to a boost in performance.
Commenting on the new tech, Cerny said in the video, “Overall, it’s still of course very early days for these technologies, they only exist in simulation right now, but the results are quite promising and I’m really excited about bringing them to a future console [read PS6] in a few years time.”
Other than the Radiance Cores, Mark Cerny and Jack Huynh also spoke about Neural Arrays. This is another groundbreaking tech that teams up a bunch of computing units together, making them share data and process things together like a single focused AI engine, instead of breaking the data down into multiple bite-sized pieces. This way, they can connect the CUs with each shader engine in a smart, efficient way.
As Mark Cerny puts it in the showcase, Neural Arrays will let the console process a large chunk of the screen in one go, making it a game-changer for the next-gen upscaling technology.
Hopefully, this next-gen GPU technology will finally push next-gen consoles to achieve the much-anticipated 4K/ 120 FPS performance on PS6. Many of the PlayStation 5 games still run at 60 FPS till today, some even getting locked to 30, which is just disheartening as a console owner.
So, what’s your take on the new GPU technology revealed by Sony and AMD for their upcoming consoles? Let us know in the comments.
