AMD and Sony have collaborated to outline AMD's approach to improving future graphics hardware performance. video posted on YouTube this week: compression, aggregation and selection. Compresses all data in the graphics pipeline to reduce memory load; aggregation of data processing units for faster matrix multiplication (key to improving AI performance, including scaling); and finally adding custom silicon to speed up the ray and path tracing needed to improve image quality.
Sony's involvement immediately got everyone thinking. PlayStation 6 Rumor Space: AMD chips are used in Sony PlayStation consoles, and that's pretty much the only place where the two companies overlap, at least for now.
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AMD is used in almost all consoles, starting with Xbox To Steam deckWith Nintendo Switch line one of the few exceptions (it is based on Nvidia chips). This is also in laptops and the company's own video cards. If you want a laptop game that won't break your budgetThe best integrated graphics are always in your best interest.
Three new technologies presented in AMD's video:
Radiance Cores: My testing over the years has shown that AMD has long lagged behind Nvidia in terms of ray tracing performance (which isn't just about pretty reflections – it greatly improves lighting), and that's at least in part because its processing happens in mainstream compute cores that are optimized for handling other types of graphics. Thus, ray tracing greatly reduces the frame rate. And the one core, one ray tracing unit architecture limits the amount of processing you can use to improve. Radiance cores handle ray tracing acceleration separately, similar to how Nvidia's RT cores do it.
Neural array: Matrix multiplication is a key algorithm for accelerating on-device AI processing—it's handled by Tensor cores, for example—and these days, scaling is done using sophisticated machine learning-based AI algorithms like Nvidia's DLSS and Intel's XeSS. Upscaling is important because it is the primary way to handle higher resolutions without sacrificing performance, and in many ways underpins a suite of technologies for improving image fidelity and performance. The AMD version is FidelityFX Super Resolution, and this is a new generation of technology. FSR Redstone (probably part of RDNA 5), you will need these arrays, as well as their Sony variant, PSSR.
Universal compression: The less compressed your data is, the more memory is required to process it and the slower it moves through the pipeline. Traditionally, GPUs only compressed the largest amounts of memory, starting with textures, in part because inserting them into the processing pipeline required a performance penalty. But silicon is so much faster than before that it probably makes sense to use it for all graphics data, and that's how universal compression works. Even if performance is low, it likely means less memory is required, which is an important factor for 4K and above games, as well as prices.
This teaser is the first of many new technologies in both the PS6 and AMD RDNA 5, and I expect to hear a lot more about it at CES in January 2026, if not sooner. I contacted AMD for more details but did not immediately receive a response.
