Sony has announced Project Amethyst, a collaboration with AMD to build up next-gen graphics architectures with AI in mind. The idea is to create a library of technologies available to all developers and on all platforms.
Amethyst, representing a combination of AMD’s red and PlayStation’s blue colours, is a deep partnership between the two brands to build up future hardware for AI. And we’re not talking only about upscaling; Sony wants an open solution that leaves developers in control of what to do with it. Improved NPC behaviours and interactions like Project ACE come to mind, not to forget ray tracing with technologies equivalent to Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction.
Though this architecture is built for generalised AI, Sony wants it to be especially potent in CNNs (Convolutional Neural Networks) – a class of deep learning processing algorithms powerful for image and video recognition.
Sony sees the future of gaming and graphics in ray tracing and machine learning. Understandable since both are still in their debut compared to rasterised graphics. In other words, RT and AI still have huge potential for improvement and more importantly, optimisation, be it through new hardware technologies or different ways to tackle these tasks.
When talking about PlayStation 5 Pro, Mark Cerny explained how Sony combined an improved RDNA 2 architecture with future RDNA ray tracing capabilities and custom-made machine learning. The reason for not using RDNA 3 comes down to compatibility, as using the previous generation avoids having to recompile all games to work on the Pro.
With AMD being an integral part of these designs, we can expect similar features and improvements to find their way into upcoming Radeon GPUs.
While AMD has yet to unveil the changes RDNA 4 brings, we can expect at least similar improvements to the custom PS5 Pro silicon. For example, we could see double the RT performance compared to RDNA 2 through the use of BVH8 acceleration structure instead of BVH4. Most importantly, we should finally see AMD offer an AI-powered FSR upscaling solution like DLSS and PSSR.
