Mark Cerny Discusses Project Amethyst Collaboration with AMD: A Game-Changer Whose Impact Will Be Measured After Developer Implementation

New Insights on Sony and AMD’s Project Amethyst Collaboration

This past week, Sony Interactive Entertainment and AMD unveiled significant updates to their Project Amethyst initiative, originally introduced in December 2024. The announcement was made during a brief nine-minute video featuring Mark Cerny, PlayStation Lead Architect, and Jack Huynh, AMD’s SVP and General Manager of the Computing and Graphics Group. This presentation highlighted three groundbreaking features: Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores, and Universal Compression, which are expected to enhance future AMD GPUs and the upcoming PlayStation 6.

Key Takeaways from the Announcement

Despite the succinct format of the video, it raised numerous questions among tech enthusiasts. Fortunately, Digital Foundry was able to gain further insights from Mark Cerny through an email Q&A, which they shared in their latest coverage, including detailed discussions about the features introduced.

A Shift in Strategy

When questioned about the transition in Sony’s approach from the PlayStation 5 Pro to the next-generation console, Cerny noted an important shift brought on by Project Amethyst:

“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 a much larger pickup of new features. So I believe we’ll see an outsized impact from the technologies announced this past week!”

Anticipating Technological Benefits

While there’s great excitement surrounding these new features, Cerny emphasized the need to remain patient until game developers can effectively leverage them. The benefits of Universal Compression and Radiance Cores cannot be accurately measured until they are integrated into game engines and utilized on the hardware.

Cerny highlighted that:

“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 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.’”

Next Steps for Developers

Cerny reassured viewers that the features currently exist only in a simulated environment, meaning there will be a waiting period before developers can actually test and incorporate these technologies into their projects.

Importance of Universal Compression

In his correspondence with Digital Foundry, Cerny underscored the significance of Universal Compression. He pointed out that as technology evolves, achieving substantial memory bandwidth increases becomes more challenging. He also confirmed that both Sony and AMD are particularly focused on enhancing machine learning and ray tracing capabilities, rather than traditional rasterization methods, for their forthcoming hardware.

Looking Ahead: PlayStation 6 Rumors

This strategic direction aligns with recent speculations about the PlayStation 6, which is rumored to offer only a 2.5x to 3x improvement in rasterization over the PlayStation 5. In contrast, ray tracing capabilities may boast enhancements ranging from 6x to 12x faster performance, as suggested by industry leaker Kepler, who also indicated a 2027 launch for Sony’s next console.

For further insights, you can watch the full presentation on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru7dK_X5tnc

Sony/AMD Project Amethyst Update – Next-Gen Tech Revealed + Mark Cerny Q&A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru7dK_X5tnc)

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