Seemingly out of nowhere, a new video on PlayStation’s YouTube channel dropped today featuring Jack Huynh, SVP and GM, Computing and Graphics Group at AMD, and Mark Cerny, lead architect of PS5 and PS5 Pro talking tech about Project Amethyst.
Project Amethyst is a collaboration project between Sony Interactive Entertainment (i.e. PlayStation) and AMD to work on new hardware architectures that power future game consoles, not just PlayStations. The project was revealed at the end Mark Cerny’s last tech seminar, a deep dive on the PS5 Pro. The Project Amethyst name, based on the purple-coloured gem, is a nod to the combination of AMD and PlayStation’s brand colours, red and blue respectively.
The AMD side of this collab has dropped multiple hints what Project Amethyst has produced in the months since, and nine months later after the announcement, we have an explanation of what exactly these two parties cooked up.
The short version of it is that the tech is not something the layperson would immediately understand, but definitely changes the way how processors are designed to bypass the current limits of graphical processing for video games. It’s very jargon-heavy.
The longer version, is that Project Amethyst has developed three new features that can improve the way graphics in video games are processed:
- Neural Arrays: a more efficient way that allows for more powerful machine learning tech, in this case AI upscalers like AMD FSR and PSSR found as found on the PS5 Pro). This will pave way for more improvements of AI upscalers in the future.
- Radiance Cores: “new dedicated hardware block” that handles only ray tracing and path tracing (specifically “ray traversal” which calculates the rays and paths to render lighting), separating the task from the general GPU that can now focus on the shading part of graphics.
- Universal Compression: an improvement to the existing DCC (Delta Colour Compression) which “reduces memory bandwidth consumed when the GPU is reading or writing certain data.” Every data is being compressed whenever possible rather than just textures. This should further reduce memory bandwidth.
The key takeaway from these developments seems to be that chip makers are hitting the limit of what these processors can do right now and must resort to a change in architecture to find new gains in graphics. Efficiency is a recurring word heard during the short tech talk.
We’ve seen graphics in video games relying more on upscalers to hit the target resolution, with mixed results and reception. GPUs have not offered more, and for some games, enough, VRAM these days. So the three big technical breakthroughs from Project Amethyst sounds like a response to the current graphics card situation.
That and the insistence of big tech pursuing the use of artificial intelligence on consumer-facing products.
The new tech that are borne out of Project Amethyst will certainly be powering the next PlayStation console (presumably the PS6) and next generation of AMD graphics cards.