Deep Co-Engineering and Machine Learning (ML): AMD and Sony have been working together under Project Amethyst to develop future machine learning technologies. This collaboration involves combining traditional rasterization with neural acceleration and ML, which is becoming a real tool for developers to achieve smarter pipelines, cleaner visuals, and smoother gameplay.
FSR and PSSR: Technologies like FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) and PSSR stem from deep co-engineering between Sony and AMD, specifically concerning the neuronetworks that power both technologies. ML is expected to enhance or "touch" more and more of the on-screen detail, fidelity, and atmosphere.
Neuro Arrays: This is a new concept designed to overcome inefficiencies caused by subdividing demanding neural network problems across numerous compute units (CUs). Neuro Arrays*allow CUs within each shader engine to "team up" to share data and process things together, effectively operating like a single focus AI engine. This innovation facilitates bigger ML models, less overhead, more efficiency, greater scalability, and unlocks better FSR, better ray regeneration, and new real-time ML-powered features on the GPU.
Radiance Cores for Path Tracing: To handle the growing demands of real-time graphics, especially with path tracing becoming central, AMD and Sony introduced Radiance Cores. Radiance Cores are a new dedicated hardware block designed for unified light transport, capable of handling ray tracing and path tracing in real time.
Hardware Ray Traversal: Radiance Cores take full control of ray traversal—one of the most compute-heavy parts of the process. This frees up the CPU for geometry and simulation and allows the GPU to focus on its primary tasks: shading and lighting. This results in a cleaner, faster, and more efficient pipeline for next-generation ray trace games.
Memory Bandwidth Bottleneck: Both advanced ML techniques and ray tracing hit the same bottleneck: current GPU memory bandwidth limitations, which hinder the seamless adoption of next-gen rendering.
Universal Compression (UC): This system is designed for future GPUs and SOCs to dramatically reduce memory bandwidth usage. It expands upon current technologies like DCC (delta color compression, found in PS5 and PS5 Pro) by evaluating and compressing every piece of data headed to memory, not just textures. UC ensures only the essential bytes are sent, leading to lower power consumption, higher fidelity assets, greater efficiency, and higher frame rates.
Synergy and Future Deployment: Universal Compression has important synergies with Neuro Arrays and Radiance Cores. While these technologies currently exist only in simulation, the results are very promising, and the plan is to bring them to a future console in a few years time.
