PlayStation 6? Sony and AMD's Plan to Power Next Gen Consoles With AI

CNET

01-07-2025

Last week I sat down with executives from PlayStation and AMD to talk about their multiyear collaboration and what they're hoping to achieve on the PlayStation 5 and beyond. During this intimate dinner, I spoke with Mark Cerny, lead architect on PS5 and PS5 Pro at Sony Interactive Entertainment, alongside Jack Huynh, SVP, GM, Computing and Graphics Group at AMD.
Sony PR said the conversation wouldn't touch any next-gen console topics but, per our discussion, future and next-generation hardware was a common phrase. It's hard to see how these advancements won't find their way onto a possible PS6 or even a dedicated PlayStation handheld (a standalone, unlike the PlayStation Portal that's tethered to a PS5 console).
Sony
What is Project Amethyst? Sony and AMD's AI collaboration for gaming
The big topic of the dinner was Project Amethyst, which was briefly revealed during a PS5 Pro Technical Seminar late last year. Amethyst's goal, which began development in 2023 when the PS5 Pro was largely complete, is to use AI and machine learning to make games look and run better.
Amethyst combines what AMD learned from its RDNA road map with SIE's use of PSSR, or PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, on the PS5 Pro to create a more ideal architecture for machine learning. The aim is to support a wide library of models that will help developers improve their games.
"[Amethyst] will support ChatGPT, if that's what the developers want," Cerny said. "That's not what we're working on, we're working [on] networks which know about detail and pixels and edges in order to stretch the capabilities of the hardware as far as possible."
Why Amethyst for a codename? It's a combination of PlayStation blue with AMD red, creating Amethyst purple. This synergy was embodied by a 100-pound, split amethyst statue displayed in the corner of our dining room.
"Machine learning-based processing is the future," Cerny told me. With Amethyst, Sony and AMD are aiming for "fewer pixels, prettier pixels coupled with machine leaning libraries to increase resolution or add frames or assist in various ways with ray tracing."
Sony PlayStation 5 Pro Review: The Most Advanced Game Console Ever Sony PlayStation 5 Pro Review: The Most Advanced Game Console Ever
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Sony PlayStation 5 Pro Review: The Most Advanced Game Console Ever
How machine learning will improve the PS5 Pro and future PlayStation consoles
These three aspects are all highlight features of last year's PlayStation 5 Pro, but Sony and AMD are looking to push this further with the help of AI models. For example, developers will be able to render a game at a lower resolution, such as 1080p, and the machine learning hardware will use its super resolution library to scale that up for a 4K image. Since the original is being rendered at a lower resolution and an easier number of pixels to manage, the hardware can run it more smoothly, making games play better at potentially higher framerates.
"We at PlayStation were beginning to think about what sort of hardware would be ideal for future consoles and what sort of algorithms would be running on it," Cerny continued "and I'm not talking about immediate needs, we just shipped the PS5 Pro, I'm talking about years in the future." My ears perked up. Cerny has said that each console takes about four years of development. If Amethyst began development in 2023 then we might be seeing a new device, possibly, in 2027.
Sony
"We knew we had to go with machine learning because Moore's Law is diminishing … the old school way of adding more performances, more transistors, more flops, more memory bandwidth," Huynh added. Their hope is that machine learning will make these advances more accessible to everyone. This is emphasized by the fact that Amethyst is going to be open for others to use, Cerny continued.
"Obviously we want to use these technologies on our consoles, but these technologies are accessible to any of AMD's customers freely," Cerny said. "There's no restrictions on how any of this can be used."
It's worth noting that, as recently as last week, Xbox reaffirmed its own partnership with AMD in regards to producing future hardware.
Huynh commented a couple times that they're "really trying to find what is the best technology at the most accessible price point." However, each generation of games, both software and hardware, gets more and more expensive. I asked if they believed machine learning would change that pattern, but they, along with AMD's PR, quickly said they aren't talking about price at this time.
One of the most exciting aspects of this was, even though they were planning to implement this new software in the coming years, they overachieved.
"[We were] looking for an algorithmic breakthrough that we could use way down the road," Cerny said."The joint SIE/AMD team did it in about nine months."
The second way they surpassed expectations was that they didn't need future hardware and all that power to run it, Cerny said: "turns out the algorithm could be implemented on current-generation hardware."
Co-developed algorithms have already been released by AMD as part of its latest AI upscaling tech, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 on PCs but what is really exciting for console gamers is that Sony is currently in the process of implementing it on PS5 Pro with a launch sometime next year.
Cerny cleared up some speculation: "It's not a cut down of the algorithm, it's the full-fat version of the co-developed super resolution."
What about PS5 owners? Why these AI upgrades are exclusive to the PS5 Pro
To be clear, Amethyst isn't just about increasing the resolution of games with AI. The project's next step is machine learning-based virtual frame generation and ray tracing. PC gamers taking advantage of FSR Redstone will get to see these two other performance increases in the second half of 2025.
"Actually this is a little bit different in the approach because what I'm trying to do is prepare for the future, the next generation of consoles," Cerny said. It's clear that AI will play a major role in the next generation of gaming consoles.
While PC gamers will be utilizing FSR, Cerny clarified that PlayStation gamers will see "implementations of the algorithm as FSR and implementations of the algorithm as Spectral" which is the brand of machine learning within SIE.
"But the fact is they will be extraordinarily close because we want the game developers to have interoperability" Cerny said.
Launch PS5 beside the PS5 Pro beside the Slim PS5.
CNET
It's clear the PS5 Pro will see a boost in performance and their games will look "much crisper," Cerny said -- unfortunately, owners of the base PS5 won't see any of these benefits.
"PS5 doesn't have the 300 dots of computational capabilities," Cerny clarified. It's also unclear which features will find their way to the Pro. "Maybe just the super resolution at this point. We have so many algorithms being developed, many of which were not designed with that particular hardware in mind."
Cerny went on to mention that the PS5 Pro is capable because it sits around an AMD RTX 9070 or RTX 9070 XT GPU for performance. "From an SIE perspective, we're not looking at the bespoke hardware of the PS5 Pro and so it does complicate the implementation of these algorithms," Cerny said "we're really focused on the future when the co-developed hardware is available."
So when will we see the fruits of Sony and AMD's Amethyst?
What I needed to know most is: When can I get my hands on this? When will I play a game that uses Project Amethyst? Cerny said that later this year is when developers will be getting an early version of the co-developed network and we should see them publishing sometime next year.
"We already have 65 games right now on FSR 4. We committed to 75 games, I think we're ahead of that schedule," Huynh added. And it sounds like it shouldn't be too difficult for developers to make the switch when working on their updates since "it's compatible with FSR3 from an API perspective."
A lot of this comes down to the game developers implementing the new software into their games, or patching an older game to take advantage of it. I asked how this will affect older games that may not have an active development scene at the moment. For example, over on the Xbox, older games have automatically gotten frame rate boosts and HDR implementation by simply running on newer hardware, without developer support.
"If [developers] do it on their side, the new algorithm is a drop-in replacement for the current PSSR. So if they patch the game, they get the new algorithm. There is still the question of 'does any of that happen automatically' and that's something we're taking a look at," Cerny said.
Suffice to say, this is definitely something we'll have to keep our eye on and test when Amethyst begins rolling out.
In the meantime, Sony is implementing a team of QA testers to keep an eye on the frames and materials generated by AI models. If frames and pixels are going to be getting produced outside of the developers' hands, they want to make sure things are displaying correctly.
"And so that type of stuff we have to train people to look at and see," said Jeff Connell, S3 General Manager, CVP, AMD. "[If] Spider-Man [is] sitting on top of a building and he spins really quickly, we pause it and you look at a building. Are all the windows lined up or are they bowed all over the place? You look at power lines, you look at things like that."
Will AI gaming features scale to future PlayStation handhelds?
It's still unclear what future hardware we'll actually see all this running on -- the successor to the PS5 remains a mystery -- but one growing trend in the games industry is powerful handhelds. In fact, Xbox announced their close collaboration with ASUS earlier this month when I went hands-on at Summer Game Fest with the ROG Xbox Ally.
Sony
It's worth noting that Sony doesn't have a current, dedicated gaming handheld on the market. The closest device is the PlayStation Portal from 2023 which can only stream games via a PS5 or the cloud. With Nintendo currently dominating the space with the recently released Switch 2, and Xbox entering it later this year, it seems like only a matter of time before Sony throws its hat in the ring.
Another attendee asked whether the Amethyst algorithms are scaled onto weaker, handheld hardware.
"The answer is yes," said Cerny. "The algorithms are scalable and so a lot of what we do is we're looking at the possible range of algorithms and how much horsepower we can grow from it, but there are solutions both above and below the ones we're looking at."
Handhelds are less of a priority for AMD, Huynh added. "We're focused right now on the desktop because I want to do the desktop right, build that foundation … and handheld is very important to us too because I believe in continuous gaming, gaming on the go, and we're very focused on handhelds as well."