Sony is about to trust AMD again for the PS6 design, which means this console will have next-gen Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs. This is something we can take for granted, but what GPU exactly will this console use? That’s a question we’ve been asking ourselves for a long time, and today we have some clarity on it.

Early 2025 will see the presentation of the RDNA 4 architecture, which will be used to power Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards. This will not be the architecture that AMD will use to build the PS6 GPUbecause at that point it will still be a few years before the launch of said console, which means they will be able to wait for at least the launch of the next generation.

Dates and development times are key. Sony launched the PS5 four years after the arrival of the PS4 Pro, so the PS6 will most likely make it to market four years after the launch of the PS5 Prowhich would bring us end of 2028, specifically between November and December of a given year.

Why should the PS6 arrive in 2028?

Well, because they have to give space to the PS5 Pro and let it be the most powerful console of the moment for a reasonable time, otherwise those who trusted Sony and bought the console They may feel betrayed.

Imagine Sony launching the PS6 in 2026, just two years after the arrival of the PS5 Pro, the console should support cycle too lowand it would be relegated to the “old generation” position too soon, which could hurt Sony if it decides to launch a PS6 Pro in the future.

On the other hand, launch between late 2027 and 2028 better suited to recovery cycles which Sony maintains with its latest consoles.

So what GPU could this new console use?

Again, we will start from the precedent. Sony launched the PS5 with the GPU it used the most modern architecture of todayalthough it lacked some important features that were present in the Xbox Series X RDNA 2 GPU, Microsoft already explained that this was because they were more patient with the development of their GPU.

It will be the successor of the RDNA 4 architecture UDNAwhich will unify the CDNA and RDNA architectures and could go into production in the second half of 2026. If confirmed, it should be launched between late 2026 and early 2027which now brings us closer to the PS6 launch date.

So we have three options. The first is that the PS6 has a Radeon GPU based on the UDNA architectureand the second possibility is that said console comes with a GPU based on its successor, which it should be UDNA 2. Both options make sense, but for now the most logical would be for Sony to go with the UDNA 2 GPU.

There is also a third possibility, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, that Sony decides to use an architecture halfway between UDNA and UDNA 2, something like GPU UDNA 1.5 adapted to some features of AMD’s future graphics architecture.

What could the PS6 GPU be like?

It’s a very interesting question, but unfortunately we still don’t have enough information to answer it accurately. However, if we look what happened to PS4 Pro and PS5 We can draw interesting conclusions that could be repeated for Sony’s future console.

The PS4 Pro had a GPU with 2,304 shadersand the PS5 has a GPU that also has 2,304 shaders. The big difference between them is in the architecture used, the processing node and the clock speed.

This story may repeat itself with the PS6i.e. that the GPU of the said console is coming to the market with the number of shaders that are the same or only slightly higher than the GPU of the PS5 Pro In that case, the key differences would again be in the architecture and in the new features that it will support.

It should also be taken into account that it will be produced in a more advanced node, probably on TSMC 3nm or 2nmdepending on how the Taiwanese giant completes its development cycles and the price of the two nodes.

What new technologies could this GPU feature?

We can be sure that the PS6 GPU will feature new intelligent upscaling technology. This may end up being a call PSSR 2 identifying it as the successor to PSSR, the intelligent scaling technology that Sony introduced with the PS5 Pro.

On the other hand, I think it’s very likely that one of the new star features of this new GPU will be AI framework generation. We have already seen what this technology can offer in the GeForce RTX 40, and its inclusion in next-generation consoles would be a natural evolution.

We can also expect an improvement in the ability to work with ray tracing, although when I see what the PS5 Pro can do, the truth is that I am not so optimistic in this regard and I don’t expect too many changes.

I hope I’m wrong, but I was already wrong about being too optimistic about the PS5 Pro and as it turns out, the difference in ray tracing compared to the PS5 is much less than I imagined. We just have to see that his GPU is only able to apply limited reflection ray tracing in Alan Wake 2, which is even worse than the low quality ray tracing version for PC.

If you want to dive deeper into the PS6 specs and other important keys like its possible price, I invite you check out this articlewhere I shared with you everything we think we know about Sony’s new console so far.

AI generated images.