PlayStation QA team may be the secret to Project Amethyst's quick turnaround

PlayStation architect Mark Cerny expected Project Amethyst to take years before bearing fruit, but results started appearing in nine months. This acceleration could be due in part to a team of highly specialized QA testers that studiously evaluated each build.

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Sony and AMD have partnered to lead the next generation of console chip technology through Project Amethyst, a multi-year initiative aimed at optimizing AI integration into games tech. Both companies are using machine learning (ML) upscaling algorithms in similar ways, with the same general end goal: to squeeze out more in-game performance without degrading graphics and visuals. AMD is building its FSR upscaling technology (now up to FSR 4), and Sony has PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR).

Project Amethyst is going so well that Sony is implementing its console-ready FSR 4 analog--a souped-up version of PSSR--onto the PS5 Pro in 2026. The quick turnaround was apparently influenced by AMD, who, as per Tom's Guide, prompted Sony to create a custom quality assurance (QA) team to analyze the output of each new PSSR algorithm. This team would determine whether or not the image quality generated by the successive PSSR iterations actually looked better than its predecessor.

"This was news to us. We did not have this at SIE; it really hadn't occurred to us. And it turns out to be vital," Mark Cerny told Tom's Guide, speaking about Project Amethyst's QA team.

The results of the in-house testing are used to inform AMD on how to better shape and build the chips of tomorrow's consoles like the PlayStation 6.

"AMD is moving extremely quickly. What I'm trying to do is prepare for the next generation of consoles, so my time-frame is multi-year here," Cerny says.

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Microsoft is also working closely with AMD to build its next-generation Xbox console hardware, as well as a multi-device lineup of chips. The partnership includes APU chips for consoles, handhelds, and cloud devices, further underlining Microsoft's focus on cross-platform content delivery.

Here's what Mark Cerny has said about Project Amethyst during the PS5 Pro technical seminar posted by Sony in 2024:

ML use in games shouldn't and can't be restricted to graphics libraries. We're also working towards a democratization of machine learning something accessible that allows direct work in AI and ML by game developers both for graphics and for gameplay.

Amethyst is not about proprietary technology for PlayStation. In fact it's the exact opposite. Through this technology collaboration we're looking to support broad work and machine learning across a variety of devices.

The other goal is to develop, in parallel, a set of high-quality CNNs for game graphics.

Both SIE and AMD will independently have the ability to draw from this collection of network architectures and training strategies, and these components should be key in increasing the richness of game graphics as well as enabling more extensive use of ray-tracing and path-tracing.