PS6 will be much more efficient at ray tracing thanks to AMD's new GPU core

Sony and AMD are working together to develop hardware that will power the next PlayStation consoles. The specifications for the PS6 have been leaked extensively and it is expected to bring up to 3x rasterization performance as well as up to 12x ray tracing performance improvements compared to the PS5. Now, Sony and AMD have revealed what they are working on and it explains the expected performance boost.

AMD shared a video on its YouTube channel explaining what it has been working on with Sony, and what the future holds. It had AMD’s SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics Group, Jack Huynh sitting with lead architect of PS5 and PS5 Pro, Mark Cerny, as they explained the new technology coming to “a future console” The key announcement was ‘Radiance Cores’ that are dedicated cores for handling ray traversal.

Building on Neural Radiance Caching for FSR Redstone, Radiance Cores is a new dedicated hardware block that does ray tracing and path tracing calculations in real time. This takes away a load of work that typically the CPU and GPU shader cores would have to handle. With the Radiance Cores, the CPU will have more bandwidth for handling geometry and simulation while the GPU can spend more bandwidth on shading and lighting.

Cleaning up the ray tracing pipeline and putting the traversal logic in hardware will provide a “significant speed boost” along with “a further boost that comes from having that hardware operate independently from the shader cores,” said Cerny.

Furthermore, along with other technological developments, Huynh shared what AMD is calling Universal Compression that efficiently compresses data headed to the memory. This will help with GPU memory bandwidth limitations that plague current gen hardware like the PS5 and the PS5 Pro. These consoles use Delta Color Compression (DCC) that also compresses data but typically only affects textures and render targets. Universal Compression will be a deeper analysis of every piece of data.

While Cerny didn’t specifically mention this tech coming to the PS6, he stated that they will be coming to a future console in a few years time. This tech will not be exclusive to Sony’s consoles, but available across the board for every gaming platform that has an AMD SoC.