At the rate prices are going up none of us are going to be able to afford one, but the godfather of the PlayStation itself has lifted the lid on the tech that will go into the PlayStation 6.
That person is no less than Mark Cerny, the lead designer of the PlayStation 4 (and a key figure in the making of Sonic the Hedgehog 2). He’s basically the Gandalf of modern consoles.
Cerny took part in a 9-minute presentation with PlayStation tech provider AMD to dig into the gaming technologies of the future.
We’re talking AI upscaling, neural acceleration, Neural Radiance Cacheing, Radiance Cores, Universal compression and more.
Getting geeky
We are not going to lie, you do need to be pretty up on your tech to really understand what's going on here. But the results they will offer? That’s easier to get your head around.
A lot of these developments are about getting to the next generation of ray tracing. This is where the behaviour of light, mostly in video games, is modelled. It allows for incredibly realistic-looking shadows, light effects and reflections, without them having to be baked in — custom made by the designers.
And these advancements should help graphics get much better without requiring tonnes more memory. That is one factor unlikely to exponentially increase in the next generation, in part thanks to the cost of tech these days.
Even if you can’t really grasp what Cerny is going on about, he’s rather calming to listen to. Like a kindly uncle, who also happens to be a robot-man from Star Trek.
If you do watch the presentation, you'll notice Cerny and AMD 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 major PlayStation console will take.
But they do clearly say this stuff will be at the forefront of future gaming.
The two main contenders for the form the next PlayStation will take are a classic console, or a handheld.
We’re likely still at least 2-3 years from any such new hardware. Time to start saving?
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