Early this past week, the news came that Xbox has announced a multi-year partnership with AMD to power its successor to the Xbox Series X|S.
The Microsoft-owned company released a video featuring Xbox president Sarah Bond confirming the deal that will see AMD co-engineer silicon across a portfolio of devices “including our next-generation Xbox consoles”,
The aim of the deal is to deliver on Xbox’s desire to be a ubiquitous “gaming platform that’s always with you so you can play the games you want across devices anywhere you want, delivering you an Xbox experience not locked to a single store or tied to one device.”
Part of that is a big reliance on cloud gaming (ie. game streaming), even as network infrastructure instability remains a significant hurdle to cloud gaming’s widespread adoption around the world.
By contrast, the president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Hideaki Nishino, told investors the other week that most players want to continue enjoying their games locally, without relying on network conditions. Thus, the traditional console experience isn’t going anywhere.
Rather, he sees cloud gaming as an “additional option” for gamers. He also indicated (via Dexerto) that the PlayStation 6 was “top of mind” at the company.
This weekend, a report at NeoGaf (via Game Rant) from a credible industry insider suggests both consoles will be built on AMD’s UDNA architecture, UDNA is essentially a rebranding of RDNA 5.
The current PS5 and Xbox Series X utilise a combination of RDNA 1 and RDNA 2 architecture, while the PS5 Pro incorporates some RDNA 4 elements for enhanced ray tracing capabilities.
UDNA has 20% better rasterisation and twice the ray tracing performance of RDNA 4, which itself had twice the rasterisation and 2.5 times the ray tracing performance of RDNA 2.
AMD only announced RDNA 4 graphics cards in February this year, while the first UDNA gaming GPUs for PCs won’t enter production until this time next year, with a release presumably scheduled for late 2026 or early 2027. The new consoles aren’t expected out until late 2027 or 2028.
