AMD and Sony PS6 deep dive - Path Tracing and AI are the future of PlayStation graphics

AMD and Sony released a new video and presentation ahead of the weekend, detailing some of the latest architectural advancements coming to PlayStation hardware as part of their Project Amethyst partnership. This partnership, which sees Sony's engineers and hardware designers led by Mark Cerny work more closely with AMD to develop graphics hardware for gaming, will also inform AMD's upcoming RDNA 5 generation of Radeon graphics for PCs and other x86 devices.

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As detailed in the announcement (check out our coverage here for the full scoop), the presentation offered a very high-level overview of how the next generation of PlayStation and Radeon architecture and hardware will work. Setting aside the various revelations, the overall feeling we got was that it's the latest bit of proof that we're on the cusp of a seismic shift (for both PlayStation and Radeon) toward neural rendering, machine learning technologies, and ray-tracing.

Looking at AMD's RDNA hardware, including this year's brand-new RDNA 4 architecture, although you've got hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and machine learning or AI capabilities, it feels more tacked on as opposed to a core part of the design. In fact, with the newly announced 'Neural Arrays' and 'Radiance Cores,' it seems AMD is adopting a more NVIDIA and GeForce RTX-like approach, similar to Team Green's Tensor Cores and RT Cores.

• Read more: PlayStation 6 will deliver 4K 120 FPS ray-traced gameplay, here's how
• Read more: Sony is designing 'big chunks' of AMD's next-gen Radeon architecture for the PlayStation 6
• Read more: AMD's FSR Redstone update will apparently work on all GPUs, including GeForce RTX

Although the new RDNA 4-powered flagship gaming GPU, the Radeon RX 9070 XT, offers a sizable boost to overall ray-tracing performance for Radeon graphics cards, it's a different story when you look at Path Tracing or Full Ray Tracing. Path Tracing is essentially ray tracing for everything, including shadows, reflections, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and other lighting effects.

It's incredibly hardware-intensive, but it's something that NVIDIA has been working with game developers to deliver since the arrival of the GeForce RTX 40 Series in late 2022. In fact, it's only possible thanks to a wide range of DLSS technologies, AI-powered Frame Generation, and even brand-new neural rendering techniques. This makes it currently "exclusive," so to speak, for the GeForce RTX Series, but that's set to change with the arrival of FSR Redstone and the next generation of AMD and Sony-developed hardware.

Path tracing will still be hardware-intensive by the time the PlayStation 6 rolls around, and not something you could brute-force through traditional rendering techniques (aka rasterization) to get 100+ FPS in 4K. Looking at the results in titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle running on a high-end GeForce RTX rig with DLSS, it's no wonder it's viewed as the immediate future for AAA-style gaming.

With Sony looking to leverage AI for super resolution or upscaling, frame generation, denoising, and even rendering, the PlayStation 6 is shaping up to be a proper ray-tracing-capable console. It's technology that we'll end up seeing in pretty much all first-party games from the likes of Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Santa Monica Studio, Guerrilla Games, and others. The good news is that with this new hardware coming to PC, alongside first-party PlayStation Studios titles, PC gamers will get to experience the first path-traced God of War and Spider-Man.