SonyandAMDare both giants in the gaming space. Both have worked together for years developing hardware forPlayStation consoles. Now, that partnership is deepening.
Mark Cerny, the lead architect of thePS5andPS5 Pro, recentlyannounceda “deeper collaboration” between Sony and AMD to develop new machine learning technology for games codenamed “Amethyst.”
Sony and AMD have two primary goals. “The first goal is a more ideal architecture for machine learning,” Cernyexplained, and the second goal is to develop “a set of high-quality CNNs for graphics.”
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This new collaboration will be a “muti-year” effort
Sony and AMD are no strangers to each other. Both collaborated on the PS5 and PS5 Pro’s GPUs based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture. The PS5 Pro made its debut in November with an improved GPU for better graphics fidelity and improved ray tracing. It also includes a new feature called PSSR (PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution), a form of AI upscaling that uses machine learning-based technology to provide sharper image quality. The feature is similar to AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS on PC, both AI-powered upscaling technologies.
In an interview withDigital Foundry, Cerny said that this is a “multi-year” project with AMD and that one should not “expect a massive hardware announcement immediately coming out of this.” With that in mind, perhaps the next PlayStation console (the PS6?) could be the first to see the benefits in a few years.
Sony and AMD’s new technology won’t be exclusive to PlayStation either. Cerny says the machine learning tech will be supported “across a variety of devices.” In an interview withIGN, Cerny said the tech will be “something that can be used broadly across PC and console and cloud.” It is exciting to hear that all gamers, not just those who use a PlayStation, could benefit from this. AI machine learning is changing the computing world, and it will be interesting to see how it changes gaming as we know it over the next few years.
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