Sony PS6 to Deliver Major Ray Tracing Leap with AMD’s New Radiance Cores

Sony and AMD have shared fresh details about their new tech for the Sony PS6. This tech drives the next-gen of PlayStation consoles. After working together for several years, the two companies are now showing off what they’ve been building.

The new tech should deliver a big jump in graphics quality. It will also come with better performance overall. Also, there will be a major upgrade in how the system handles ray tracing.

Recent leaks about the PS6 show that it will offer up to three times the rasterisation performance of the PS5. It will also offer as much as twelve times the ray tracing power of the PS5.

Those claims now make more sense after AMD and Sony shared what they have been working on behind the scenes.

In a new video posted on AMD’s official YouTube channel, AMD’s Senior VP of Computing and Graphics, Jack Huynh, sat down with Mark Cerny, the lead architect behind the PS5 and PS5 Pro.

Together, they explained the core technologies driving this new leap in performance and efficiency.

The main highlight of the announcement is AMD’s new “Radiance Cores.” These are special chips built to manage ray tracing. The chips also manage path tracing as scenes are rendered.

Before now, that job was handled by both the CPU and GPU. This often slows things down. With Radiance Cores handling that heavy lifting, the CPU can focus on shapes and movement. Also, the GPU focuses on lighting and detail to make things look smoother and more lifelike.

By moving the ray traversal logic into special hardware, AMD is freeing the CPU. The CPU will now focus on geometry and simulation. For the GPU, it can then use more resources for shading and lighting.

Cerny described this change as providing a “significant speed boost,” noting that performance gains also come from the Radiance Cores operating independently of the main shader units.

In addition to the new cores, AMD also unveiled “Universal Compression.” This technology is designed to ease memory bandwidth pressure. Current PlayStation hardware, including the PS5 and PS5 Pro, uses Delta Colour Compression to reduce data load. But that approach mostly affects textures and render targets.

Universal Compression goes a step further. It checks and shrinks all kinds of data before it’s sent to memory. This deeper, system-wide compression method helps the GPU work more efficiently. It cuts down one of the biggest limits of current console design.

Cerny did not confirm that these tech are just for the PS6. But he made it clear that they are coming to “a future console” in the next few years. AMD also plans to bring Radiance Cores and Universal Compression to its wider GPU lineup. This means that PC gamers with AMD chips will benefit as well.