At the rate at which prices are rising, none of us will be able to afford one, but the godfather of PlayStation himself has lifted the lid on the technology that will be in the PlayStation 6.
That person is none other than Mark Cerny, the lead designer of the PlayStation 4 (and a key figure in the development of Sonic the Hedgehog 2). He is simply Gandalf to modern consoles.
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Cerny participated in a 9-minute presentation with PlayStation’s technology provider AMD to dive into the future of gaming technologies.
We’re talking about AI Upscaling, Neural Acceleration, Neural Radiance Caching, Radiance Cores, Universal Compression, and more.
Getting nerdy
We’re not going to lie, you have to be pretty up-to-date on technology to really understand what’s going on here. But the results they will offer? It’s easier to understand.
Many of these developments are about getting to the next generation of ray tracing. This is when the behavior of light, mostly in video games, is modeled. It enables incredibly realistic looking shadows, lighting effects and reflections, without having to be “baked in” – custom-made by the designers.
And these advances should help graphics be much better without requiring a lot more memory. It’s a factor that’s unlikely to increase exponentially in the next generation, thanks in part to the price of technology these days.
While you may not fully understand what Cerny is talking about, he is quite calm to listen to. Like a friendly uncle, who also happens to be a robot man from Star Trek.
If you watch the presentation, you’ll notice that Cerny and AMD’s senior vice president Jack Huynh don’t actually mention the PlayStation 6 directly. And right now, we don’t even know what form the next big PlayStation console will take.
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But they clearly state that these things will be at the forefront of the future of gaming.
The two main candidates for what form the next PlayStation will take are a classic console, or a handheld.
We’re probably still at least 2-3 years away from something like this new hardware. Time to start saving?
