While there has been plenty of speculation regarding next-generation consoles, a recent report indicates that Sony might be the only company to feature cutting-edge RDNA5 GPU architecture for its rumored handheld. In a recent Patreon-exclusive video (via Reddit), Digital Foundry’s Rich Leadbetter has said that Sony has an “exclusive of sorts for RDNA5 on handhelds.”
“There have been some behind-the-scenes discussions that Sony has an exclusive of sorts on RDNA5 for handheld with its mobile device that’s coming.”
It is worth noting that, according to Leadbetter and industry insider KeplerL2, this exclusivity isn’t really a proper deal. Rather, Sony seems to be the only customer willing enough to pay to fabricate the number of chips that would make it worthwhile for AMD. For its part, the chipmaker has no interest in dedicating its fabrication resources to creating niche hardware that wouldn’t quite make the company as much money as hardware for data centers.
However, this indirect form of exclusivity also means that any potential handheld being developed by Xbox or Valve might not end up featuring RDNA5 GPU hardware, leaving them an entire generation behind Sony’s PS6 handheld. Other handhelds will be stuck on hardware based on what AMD refers to as “RDNA4m”, which uses RDNA 3.5 for its hardware architecture paired with the machine learning capabilities of RDNA4.
RDNA5, on the other hand, is expected by hardware experts to be a major performance jump over its predecessors thanks to additional compute units and cores dedicated to ray tracing. Along with this, it is also slated to feature a host of new technologies that the company had previously discussed, including Neural Arrays and Universal Compression.
Aside from the improvements in raw horsepower, Sony’s PS6 handheld will also benefit quite a bit from the inclusion of these new technologies. AMD’s SVP and GM of computing and graphics group, Jack Huynh, and PlayStation’s lead architect, Mark Cerny, had unveiled these technologies together last October. One of the biggest improvements was Universal Compression, which allows the GPU to evaluate every piece of data that is making its way to memory and compress it when possible. The reduction in memory usage will allow incredible performance gains.
“That means the GPU can deliver more detail, higher frame rates, and greater efficiency,” said Huynh, with Cerny noting that the tech would allow the performance of GPUs to far exceed what would otherwise show up on a simple specs sheet.
“There’s a multitude of benefits from this, including lower power consumption, higher fidelity assets, and perhaps most importantly, the synergies that Universal Compression has with Neural Arrays and Radiance Cores, as we work to deliver the best possible experiences to gamers,” said Cerny.
Neural Arrays will also offer some performance gains, since the technology can help clear up some bottlenecks that often affect modern GPUs across PCs and consoles. It essentially allows compute units to work together to solve a single large problem by breaking it up into smaller “bite-sized pieces”.
For more details about how these technologies can give us a good idea of Sony’s future console hardware, check out our thoughts.
