Renowned AMD leaker Kepler has revealed on the NeoGAF board that Sony is planning to launch the PlayStation 6 console in 2027, with the caveat that ‘unexpected delays’ could still happen.
This would be right on time for a 7-year lifecycle, just like its predecessor, the PlayStation 4. The main difference would be with regards to the PlayStation 5 Pro, which was released four years after the PS5 (and therefore only three years before the alleged PS6 launch window), whereas the PlayStation 4 Pro appeared on the market three years after the PS4 and four years before the launch of the PS5.
Rumors about the specifications of the PlayStation 6 have been circulating for a while, mainly due to YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead, who leaked an estimated computing power of 34 to 40 Teraflops with a massive ray tracing performance uplift of 6x to 12x compared to the PlayStation 5.
Just yesterday, AMD and Sony have divulged new details on their ongoing Project Amethyst collaboration to improve hardware and software in future GPUs and consoles. Three technologies were singled out at this time: Radiance Cores, Neural Arrays, and Universal Compression.
- The first one is specifically designed to deliver that rumored ray tracing performance boost: the Radiance Cores hardware blocks will accelerate the computationally intensive ray tracing traversal calculations, freeing shader cores to work on the rest of the rendered scene.
- Neural Arrays, on the other hand, are dedicated AI accelerator units integrated into the GPU architecture. They are designed to handle machine learning inference tasks natively on the console hardware, achieving much greater efficiency compared to current methods.
- Finally, Universal Compression is a new device-agnostic compression technology that reduces the data footprint across textures, geometry, and other game assets without significantly reducing quality. It optimizes memory bandwidth and storage, allowing games to load faster and operate more efficiently. This should also translate into improved streaming performance, possibly reducing stuttering during gameplay.
Interestingly, in that video, PlayStation System Architect Mark Cerny also teased that these technologies would appear on a new console (the PlayStation 6) in a few years’ time. If the rumor is true, that just means two years, possibly a bit sooner than most expected. Indeed, it feels like we only started getting ‘next-generation’ games in the past couple of years, whereas most titles previously supported cross-generation releases. Still, this generation has a few aces left, like The Witcher IV and The Elder Scrolls VI.
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