PlayStation chief architect Mark Cerny is back at it again and will go into detail about how the PlayStation 5 Pro achieves its various graphical improvements. Cerny first introduced the PS5 Pro in September and in a new 37-minute video, he explains how the Pro’s improved GPU uses AMD’s technology and announces “deeper collaboration” between Sony and the chip maker.
The PS5 uses AMD’s RDNA 2 GPU architecture, which was originally released in 2020, while the PS5 Pro uses what Cerny refers to as RDNA 2.X in the video.
The new GPU is a mix of the GPUs already introduced on the PS5, with select features from the more advanced RDNA 3 architecture introduced by AMD in 2022. This is combined with ray tracing techniques, which Cerny says are from future RDNA technology on AMD’s roadmap, and custom machine learning features created for the PS5 Pro. Obviously these components of machine learning are also a key part of AMD and Sony’s future work.
“AMD has been a great partner for SIE for many years,” says Cerny. “And I’m proud to announce that we have begun an in-depth collaboration focused on machine learning-based technology for graphics and gameplay.”
According to Cerny, “Amethyst,” the name the companies have chosen for their new project, is primarily about creating “a more ideal architecture for machine learning.” The new hardware architectures the companies are developing could benefit future consoles and AMD’s own GPUs, but they’re just one part of the plan. Sony and AMD are also working towards the “democratisation of machine learning”, which sounds like a potential software tool to make it easier for developers to implement AI in gameplay and graphics.
The whole video is packed with information about the thinking and engineering that went into the PS5 Pro and is a must-watch if you want to know what “Pro” means in this case. It might not convince you to upgrade to the new $700 console, but it certainly proves that Sony didn’t take this lightly.
When Sony first released the PlayStation 5, it wasn’t possible to expand the console’s storage. Thankfully, that changed with a software update that the company released less than a year later. And with how large some game installs have gotten in recent years, that’s a good thing, too: the PS5’s built-in 667GB of space may have been good enough in the system’s first year, but now, the default drive is absolutely limiting.
The good news is that a standard PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 NVMe SSD can solve all your PS5 storage problems. If this jumble of abbreviations is confusing to you, don’t worry: you’ll see that it’s not that complicated. And if you just want to know which are the best PS5 SSDs, we’ve ranked them at the top.