AMD and Sony have offered an early glimpse into the future of graphics technology in a new YouTube video this week, teasing three key innovations aimed at boosting performance across gaming hardware: compression, aggregation, and dedication.
The approach breaks down as follows: compressing all data within the graphics pipeline to reduce memory overhead, aggregating compute units for faster matrix multiplication (critical for AI-driven tasks like upscaling), and adding dedicated silicon for ray and path tracing acceleration to dramatically enhance visual fidelity.
A PS6 Connection?
Sony’s involvement instantly set the rumor mill spinning with speculation about the PlayStation 6. AMD’s chips power every PlayStation since the PS4, and outside of console development, the two companies have little overlap — making future PlayStation hardware the most obvious point of collaboration.
AMD’s influence extends far beyond Sony. Its processors drive nearly every major console — from Microsoft’s Xbox line to Valve’s Steam Deck — with Nintendo’s Switch remaining a notable Nvidia-powered exception. AMD GPUs also appear in laptops, desktops, and its own Radeon graphics cards. For budget-conscious laptop gamers, stronger integrated graphics are always a major win.
The Three New Technologies
Radiance Cores
AMD has historically trailed Nvidia in ray tracing performance, largely because ray tracing workloads run on its primary compute cores — which are optimized for general graphics processing rather than specialized ray-trace acceleration. This means heavy ray tracing can cripple frame rates. AMD’s new Radiance Cores dedicate hardware to ray tracing, functioning much like Nvidia’s RT cores, and should significantly boost lighting realism without such severe performance drops.
Neural Array
Matrix multiplication underpins modern on-device AI performance. It’s the same principle behind Nvidia’s Tensor cores and forms the backbone of upscaling methods such as Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS. Upscaling allows games to render at lower resolutions and use AI-driven reconstruction to achieve near-native quality — a huge advantage for performance. AMD’s existing solution, FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), is evolving into FSR Redstone, expected to debut with RDNA 5. Sony’s variant, PlayStation Super Resolution (PSSR), will likely leverage the Neural Array to power next
generation upscaling.
Universal Compression
Traditionally, GPUs compress only the most memory-intensive assets — textures, for example — because compression added latency to the pipeline. However, with faster modern silicon, AMD says it’s now feasible to compress all graphics data. Universal Compression could reduce total memory requirements without significantly impacting performance, especially important for 4K and higher resolution games where memory demands spike.
Looking Ahead
This teaser likely marks the first of many reveals for AMD’s RDNA 5 architecture and the next PlayStation hardware. With CES 2026 just months away, expect deeper technical demonstrations soon. AMD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
