In a new video, Sony’s Mark Cerny and AMD’s Jack Huynh discuss architectural advancements that will allow for faster ray tracing and even path tracing on PlayStation 6.
In a video posted to the official PlayStation YouTube channel this morning, AMD and Sony detailed a few major advancements in AMD’s GPU architecture developed under the two companies‘ Project Amethyst collaboration—advancements that point toward strong path tracing performance on both PlayStation 6 and AMD’s upcoming RDNA 5 architecture. While PlayStation 5 Pro and extant RDNA 4 GPUs both boast substantial advancements in hybrid rasterized and ray-tracing workloads, path tracing—a form of ray tracing that does not rely on rasterization for primary visualization, seen in projects like Portal With RTX and Quake 2 RTX—has long been a pain point on AMD hardware, and still notoriously demanding on performance with Intel and even NVIDIA GPU hardware. As lead PlayStation architect Mark Cerny explains with the help of AMD SVP and GM of its Computing and Graphics Group, Jack Huynh, the next generation of AMD GPU dies, including those in the PlayStation 6, will be built with Neural Arrays of Compute Units, all loaded with new Radiance Cores. While GPUs are already stacked with plenty of Compute Units and thousands of GPU cores split across them, the issue with this approach (particularly in the context of ray-tracing) is that those tasks still have to be subdivided across those cores and CUs properly, which can be inefficient for tasks not easily solved by the GPU.
