Sony's Mark Cerny Has Worked on "Big Chunks of RDNA 5" with AMD
92 comments
·July 2, 2025DiabloD3
There isn't an RDNA5 on the roadmap, though. It's been confirmed 4 is the last (and was really meant to be 3.5, but grew into what is assumed to be the PS5/XSX mid-gen refresh architecture).
Next is UDNA1, a converged architecture with it's older sibling, CDNA (formerly GCN).
Like, the article actually states this, but runs an RDNA 5 headline anyways.
greenknight
AMD does do semi-custom work.
Whats to stop sony being like we dont want UDNA 1, we want a iteration of RDNA 4.
For all we know, it IS RDNA 5... it just wont be available to the public.
Moto7451
And their half step/semi-custom work can find their way back to APUs. RDNA 3.5 (the version marketed as such) is in the Zen 5 APUs with Mobile oriented improvements. It wouldn’t surprise me if a future APU gets RDNA 5. GCN had this sort of APU/Console relationship as well.
cma
Also steamdeck before the OLED version and magic leap 2 shared a custom chip, with some vision processing parts fused off for steamdeck.
blasphemers
Maybe read the article before commenting on it, it's not that long.
"Big chunks of RDNA 5, or whatever AMD ends up calling it, are coming out of engineering I am doing on the project"
cubefox
It's just a name. I'm sure this is all pretty iterative work.
dragontamer
UDNA isn't a name but instead a big shift in strategy.
CDNA was for HPC / Supercomputers and Data center. GCN always was a better architecture than RDNA for that.
RDNA itself was trying to be more NVidia like. Fewer FLOPs but better latency.
Someone is getting the axe. Only one of these architectures will win out in the long run, and the teams will also converge allowing AMD to consolidate engineers to improving the same architecture.
We won't know what the consolidated team will release yet. But it's a big organizational shift that surely will affect AMDs architectural decisions.
timschmidt
My understanding was that CDNA and RDNA shared much if not most of their underlying architecture, and that the fundamental differences had more to do with CDNA supporting a greater variety of numeric representations to aid in scientific computing. Whereas RDNA really only needed fp32 for games.
whatever1
PS5 was almost twice as fast as the PS4 pro, yet we did not see the generational leap we saw with the previous major releases.
It seems that we are the stage where incremental improvements in graphics will require exponentially more computing capability.
Or the game engines have become super bloated.
Edit: I stand corrected in previous cycles we had orders of magnitude improvement in FLOPS.
pjmlp
A reason was backwards compatibility, studios were already putting lots of money into PS4 and XBox One, thus PS5 and XBox X|S (two additional SKUs), were already too much.
Don't forget one reason that studios tend to favour consoles has been regular hardware, and that is no longer the case.
When middleware starts to be the option, it is relatively hard to have game features that are hardware specific.
cosmic_cheese
Less effort going into optimization also plays a factor. On average games are a lot less optimized than they used to be. The expectation seems to be that hardware advances will fix deficiencies in performance.
This doesn’t affect me too much since my backlog is long and by the time I play games, they’re old enough that current hardware trivializes them, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. It almost makes me wish for a good decade or so of performance stagnation to curb this behavior. Graphical fidelity is well past the point of diminishing returns at this point anyway.
martinald
We have had a decade of performance stagnation.
Compare PS1 with PS3 (just over 10 years apart).
PS1: 0.03 GFLOPS (approx given it didn't really do FLOPS per se) PS3: 230 GFLOPS
Nearly 1000x faster.
Now compare PS4 with PS5 pro (also just over 10 years apart):
PS4: ~2TFLOPS PS5 Pro: ~33.5TFLOPS
Bit over 10x faster. So the speed of improvement has fallen dramatically.
Arguably you could say the real drop in optimization happened in that PS1 -> PS3 era - everything went from hand optimized assembly code to running (generally) higher level languages and using abstrated graphics frameworks like DirectX and OpenGL. Just noone noticed because we had 1000x the compute to make up for it :)
Consoles/games got hit hard by first crypto and now AI needing GPUs. I suspect if it wasn't for that we'd have vastly cheaper and vastly faster gaming GPUs, but when you were making boatloads of cash off crypto miners and then AI I suspect the rate of progress fell dramatically for gaming at least (most of the the innovation I suspect went more into high VRAM/memory controllers and datacentre scale interconnects).
SlowTao
It is not just GPU performance, it is that visually things are already very refined. A ten times leap in performance doesn't really show as ten times the visual spectical like it used to.
Like all this path tracing/ray tracing stuff, yes it is very cool and can add to a scene but most people can barely tell it is there unless you show it side by side. And that takes a lot of compute to do.
We are polishing an already very polished rock.
cosmic_cheese
Yeah there’s been a drop off for sure. Clearly it hasn’t been steep enough for game studios to not lean on anyway, though.
One potential forcing factor may be the rise of iGPUs, which have become powerful enough to play many titles well while remaining dramatically more affordable than their discrete counterparts (and sometimes not carrying crippling VRAM limits to boot), as well as the growing sector of PC handhelds like the Steam Deck. It’s not difficult to imagine that iGPUs will come to dominate the PC gaming sphere, and if that happens it’ll be financial suicide to not make sure your game plays reasonably well on such hardware.
Dylan16807
You divided 230 by .03 wrong, which would be 10000-ish, but you underestimated the PS1 by a lot anyway. The CPU does 30 MIPS, but also the geometry engine does another 60 MIPS and the GPU fills 30 or 60 million pixels per second with multiple calculations each.
jayd16
By what metric can you say this with any confidence when game scope and fidelity has ballooned?
cosmic_cheese
Because optimized games aren’t completely extinct and there’s titles with similar levels of size, fidelity, and feature utilization with dramatically differing performance profiles.
CoolGuySteve
The current generation has a massive leap in storage speed but games need to be architected to stream that much data into RAM.
Cyberpunk is a good example of a game that straddled the in between, many of it's performance problems on the PS4 were due to constrained serialization speed.
Nanite and games like FF16 and Death Stranding 2 do a good job of drawing complex geometry and textures that wouldn't be possible on the previous generation
Vilian
Nanite is actively hurting performance
teamonkey
Nanite has a performance overhead for simple scenes but will render large, complex scenes with high-quality models much more efficiently, providing a faster and more stable framerate.
It’s also completely optional in Unreal 5. You use it if it’s better. Many published UE5 games don’t use it.
cwbriscoe
A lot of the difference went into FPS rather than improved graphics.
adamwk
And loading times. I think people already forgot how long you had to wait on loading screens or how many faked loading (moving through a brush while the next area loads) there was on PS4
SlowTao
PS4 wasnt too terrible but jumping back to PS3... wow I completely forgot how memory starved that machine was. Working on it, we knew at the time but in retro spect it was just horrible.
Small RAM space with the hard CPU/GPU split (so no reallocation) feeding off a slow HDD which is being fed by an even slower Bluray disc, you are sitting around for a while.
ryao
Did you forget that on the N64, load times were near instantaneous?
bentt
This is correct. Also, it speaks to what players actually value.
ThatMedicIsASpy
I have played through CP2077 with 40, 30 and 25 fps. A child doesn't care if Zelda runs with low FPS.
The only thing I value is a consistent stream of frames on a console.
LikesPwsh
Also FPS just requires throwing more compute at it.
Excessively high detail models require extra artist time too.
kridsdale1
Yes PS5 can output 120hz on hdmi. A perfect linear output to direct your more compute at.
vrighter
twice as fast, but asked to render 4x the pixels. Do the math
SlowTao
Well you see... I got nothing.
The path nowadays is to use all kinds of upscaling and temporal detail junk that is actively recreating late 90s LCD blur. Cool. :(
ryao
This is the result of an industry wide problem where technology just is not moving forward as quickly as it used to move. Dennard scaling is dead. Moore’s law is also dead for SRAM and IO logic. It is barely clinging to life for compute logic, but the costs are skyrocketing as each die shrink happens. The result is that we are getting anemic improvements. This issue is visible in Nvidia’s graphics offerings too. They are not improving from generation to generation like they did in the past, despite Nvidia turning as many knobs as they could to higher values to keep the party going (e.g. power, die area, price, etcetera).
timschmidt
Jim Keller disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
teamonkey
This article shows how great a leap there was between previous console generations.
https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/console-gpu-power-compared-...
silisili
AFAIK, this generation has been widely slammed as a failure due to lack of new blockbuster games. Most things that came out were either for PS4, or remasters of said games.
There have been a few decent sized games, but nothing at grand scale I can think of, until GTA6 next year.
jayd16
There were the little details of a global pandemic and interest rates tearing through timelines and budgets.
LorenDB
If the Playstation contributions are good enough, maybe RDNA4 -> RDNA5 will be just as good as RDNA3 -> RDNA4. As long as they get the pricing right, anyway.
monster_truck
We've known this for a while, it's an extension of the upscaling and frame generation AMD already worked on in conjunction with Sony for FSR 3 and to a much greater extent FSR 4. Previous articles also have highlighted their shared focus on BVH optimizations
erulabs
Excited to see how the software support for UDNA1 works out. Very hopeful we'll see some real competition to Nvidia soon in the datacenter. Unfortunately I think the risk is quite high: if AMD burns developers again with poor drivers and poor support, it's hard to see how they'll be able to shake the current stigma.
martinald
Take this with a pinch of salt, but the most recent ROCm release installed out of the box on my WSL2 machine and worked first time with llama.cpp. I even compiled llama.cpp from source with 0 issues. That has never happened ever in my 5+ years of having AMD GPUs. Every other time I've tried this it's either failed and required arcane workarounds, or just not worked entirely (including running on 'real' Linux).
I feel like finally they are turning the corner on software and drivers.
null
brcmthrowaway
Who is a better computer architect, Mark Cerny or Anand Shimpi?
wmf
Did we ever hear what Anand does at Apple?
lofaszvanitt
Yes, but what will use it when there are so few games on the platform in the current PS generation?
shmerl
When will Sony support Vulkan on PS?
departure4885
Why would they? They have their own (two actually) proprietary graphics APIs: GNM and GNMX.
shmerl
I'd ask why wouldn't they. Not a fan of NIH and wheel reinvention proponents.
MindSpunk
Sony's low level APIs for PS4 and PS5 (it doesn't use GNM) is almost a direct mapping to the hardware with very little abstraction compared to Vulkan/DX12. Vulkan is still very high level compared to what's going on inside the driver. There's no point paying the cost of Vulkan's abstractions when half the point of a game console is to have a fixed hardware target, hence GNM.
departure4885
Because if they write their own they get to own the political/bureaucratic portion of the problem. For better or worse, they don't have to deal with the Kronos Group. They get to optimize their APIs directly against their research with AMD.
ZenithExtreme
AMD’s next-gen GPUs may have some PlayStation tech inside.
stanac
I don't think he is employed by Sony, but work as a consultant for them. So both Sony PS 4/5 and AMD GPUs have his tech inside.
mikepurvis
So you're right, though I would never have guessed— in the PS5 hype cycle he gave that deep dive architecture presentation that for all the world looked like he was a Sony spokesperson.
Why not link to the original article here:
https://www.tomsguide.com/gaming/playstation/sonys-mark-cern...