PlayStation's Mark Cerny and AMD's Jack Huynh Discuss the 'Future of Play' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 09 October 2025 / 4,150 Views
Sony Interactive Entertainment's Mark Cerny and AMD's Jack Huynh in a new video discuss Project Amethys, a collaboration between the two companies focused on Machine Learning-based technology for graphics and gameplay.
Cerny is best known as the lead architect on the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro, while Huynh is AMD's senior vice president and general manager of computing and graphic.
"AMD’s Jack Huynh, SVP and GM, Computing and Graphics Group, and Mark Cerny, lead architect of PS5 and PS5 Pro, discuss the latest developments from Project Amethyst – the collaboration between Sony Interactive Entertainment and AMD focused on Machine Learning-based technology for graphics and gameplay – a shared commitment to push gaming technology forward," reads the description to the video.
"Mark and Jack share three gaming technology breakthroughs that will lead to benefits across the gaming industry in the future."
View the video below:
Cerny and Huynh share three gaming technology breakthroughs in the video that will lead to benefits across the video game industry in the future. This includes new machine learning technology for FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), dedicated hardware that handles ray and path tracing in real time, and a new Universal Compression system.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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So this is mainly about CU structures called Neural Arrays, that allow for higher efficiencies with more demanding ML. This is good for De-noising, Ray-regeneration of Raytracing/pathtracing and more demanding upscaling technologies. Apparnetly AMD are making dedicated specialised hardware units that off load the gpu/cpu tasks when it comes to some of all this Raytracing/pathtracing, so the CU's can focus on doing other machine learning stuff (ei. upscaling ect) without this impacting one another. This is why they keep mentioning "efficiency", hardware based solutions that tackle one thing, and one thing only, are typically better than something ment to do general compute.
TLDR - AMD is going all in on Raytracing/pathtracing.
PS6 should be a HUGE boost in this area compaired to the PS5.
This is also something I think RDNA cards from AMD GPU's will have in the future.
Radiance Cores they keep mentioning and stuff... sounds like its the path they are walking with the GPUs.
So yes on PS6 of course for obvious reasons but also on other AMD products like their mainline GPUs and the next Xbox. Sony has made it clear sense the beginning that all the technology they are working on through the Amethyst collab is not specific to any specific machine and will benefit any AMD customer.
Sony is doing this beduase its ensures that the features on the next Xbxo are supported across the board, which is a win for their customers... but also because they get PSSR out of the deal whcih means they don't have to pay for FSR. AMD wins for multiple reasons too. The
I trust Cerny when it comes to hardware, hitting the sweet spot (price/performance) and next gen stuff not being overlooked and weighed appropriately. Looking forwards to future announcements.
Watching the video, I can't help laugh how bad the other guy is at this camra talk stuff.... Why do engineers have such bad communication skills? (remember to read teleprompter, smile and nod at sony when talking about them ect ect (its so stiff)).
Anybodys' speaking skills would look bad next to the Cern, the Bob Ross of silicon.
They can talk all they want, but I want to see something. Not a "speculation" of something. The concern I have for next gen is the price. I fear the base consoles will cost $650 minimum.
I'm curious to hear what digital foundry has to say about this. It almost sounds like AMD is using PlayStation as a way to adopt new features that otherwise wouldn't otherwise see support on PC since they don't really have the brand strength that Nvidia has. But I do wonder if any of these things will be as revolutionary as when Nvidia added RT cores. The universal memory had me intrigued. How much extra bandwidth can you get by doing that?
Delta Colour Compression only works for textures... which granted are probably a large chunk of what your GPU needs memory bandwidth for. Nvidia has better DCC than AMD (by a small bit), which helps them with rendering performance and memory bandwidth. Universal Memory Compression works in theory on everything... Its not "adding extra bandwidth", its saving you bandwidth, if you compare two work loads to one another. Which means you could have some "saved" bandwidth to then use which you could view as "extra" like you did. Yes I'm looking forwards to seeing if this something that has a large impact or not, on PS6... and if in future APU's on PC's could make use of something simular.
AMD and Sony has actually been working together for years now... Many design elements in the Playstation 4's GPU eventuated to PC GCN GPU's for example.
Sony gets to invest in chip technology without the risk and AMD gets a more efficient design.
Don't get the wrong idea though, AMD was always heading down this path since nVIDIA started CUDA all those decades ago and started getting design wins, AMD had a very long roadmap and Sony is accelerating those efforts.
As for the bandwidth savings, it's going to depend on the data set, highly compressible textures will see the biggest savings of upwards of 50% with a lossless algorithm, where some pieces of shader code would see much smaller gains, this just allows the chip to compress everything, even if it's only 1% for some pieces of data, it's still a 1% gain... And it all adds up.
But the point is to compress everything in order to save on memory bandwidth.
Bandwidth has been increasing slower than shader, AI or RT capability... AMD will likely have implemented extra binning/culling as an efficiency gain, plus better caching to try and make up the difference.
Plus RAM is actually getting more expensive thanks to A.I gobbling up RAM supply and suppliers cutting production, which is likely to cause a RAM price crunch for the next decade or more, Sony and AMD are likely looking for sustainable pathways for a cheaper and more efficient approach...
AMD did make the right choice by using GDDR6 with it's 9060XT GPU's which was competitive with the GDDR7 Geforce 5060Ti for example and relied on superior caching to make up the difference.
Efficiency is key going forwards not brute force.
It should be noted that Mark Cerny is not a Sony employee and is instead considered a consultant.
A consultant that is just always on the payroll ? :P If hes not a Sony Employee hes the next best thing.
The man himself has said that not being an employee gives him more freedom and fully avoids red tape.
Probably also gives him more money. Consultants cost the big bucks.
Will the ps6 allow for AAA first party devs to give us atleast 2 games before ps7? Or another 5 to 6 yr development cycle again?
I don't care about graphical fidelity anymore. It was great as the tech showed massive leaps in capability, but that hasn't be the case for the last 10+ years. Now it is causing games to take forever to come out and no one gives a flying fuck. Fortnite and Minecraft are STILL the most popular games around...
The bloke that said the PS5 SSD will remove load times and make the console more powerful. Cooly
What about the load times? Loading a savefile in MGS 3 Delta takes 2;07 seconds on Base PS5.
Yeah, I can boot up my PS5 and get into a game in less than a minute. A dramatic improvement over the PS4. Not sure what he's on about lol
Edit: There's also a few games I've played that doesn't have loading screens. FF16 and Spiderman 2. I'm sure there's more that I didn't played. So, again, I'm not sure what's the point being made here.
So the load times still exist and the power of the console isn't improved by the power of the SSD..
The first time you tried downloading a large file with fiber internet you probably saw that it didn't download everything instantly and said "wow, they lied to me!".
Yeah, no i didn't. Maybe you did.
He said it would "drastically reduce, and effectively eliminate, load times", which 0-2 seconds is.
And do you remember when people tried playing Ratchet and Clank on a HDD? Same applies to a SATA SSD or slower nvme.
The same bloke who hyped the Cell Processor, The same guy who said the PS4 Pro was as powerful as the XB1X if they halved the floats,
They also Claimed Racket and Clank could not run on a HDD and yet only years later were proven wrong.. and now that magical SSD to make your console more powerful and remove load times.
This guy talks alot of nonsense and been doing so for decades.
I have a Samsung 9100 Pro Gen5 SSD and load times still exist and does not make my PC more powerful.
it sounds like ps6 is not 27, more like 28 or even later.. sony wants all ps5 people to buy the ps5 pro.. That's the vibe im getting from this and other playstation 6 related articles. weird..
Wouldn't be surprised. Xbox360 released a year early to give it a 5mil sales head start from the PS3, but times were different and back then and people were really excited to jump into the HD world with new HD tvs coming out too.
I don't think MS is in a great position right now but if they plan to release it early then they better offer something new and/or extremely affordable to gain attention. We'll see in a few years.
So it has like ~21% more CU's than the PS5pro.... and More's Law is Dead, was speculating 25-33% more performance than the PS5pro. Somewhere in that range, and a 2027 launch for it. Meanwhile Playstation is talking about "flops not mattering" for scaling performance much, and making hardware dedicated for offloading the cpu/gpu for Raytracing instead (and likely launching 2028). So its intresting to see where this all ends.
Flops never mattered. Not really anyway.
Unfortunately Microsoft and Sony used it for advertising which gave people the wrong idea.
Mores Law is Dead is never to be trusted, he gets just as much wrong as much as he gets right... And removes his old videos where he was wrong to make himself seem credible... And people are gullible enough not to see it.
He just makes "educated guesses". And I often do the same thing... Where my educated guesses were bang-on with the PS4 and PS5 before their unveiling. (I.E. PS5 having 16GB Ram)
Anyone can do it if they have enough knowledge.
Increased CU's isn't really required either... For example going from the Radeon 6600XT to the 9060XT saw a doubling of performance with the same CU's, so that's the minimum gen-on-gen increase we should expect if Sony sticks with the same CU count... Any increase in CU's is just a massive bonus... A 21% CU increase with a doubling of per-CU performance will net some big gains.
But CU counts aren't everything, the big focus is A.I. to reduce RT and Rasterization demand and they use different pieces of the silicon.
While I'm sure Microsoft wants to go first... I think the lauch really depends more on when AMD gets out these new features. Microsoft probably shouldn't launch their hardware before the new features are complete. Therefore, it is much more probable that they launch the same year.
