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AMD wants to catch up on Ray Tracing

by on22 July 2024


Coming to RDNA 4 GPUs

Hardware information leaker @Kepler_L2 shared a partially redacted data sheet highlighting the expected ray tracing features coming to RDNA 4 GPUs.

According to Toms Hardware these features are also likely in the hybrid RDNA 3 + RDNA 4 RT design for the PS5 Pro, which is anticipated to launch later this year or early next year. The leaked data suggests that advancing ray tracing technology will be a significant focus of RDNA 4.

The leaked features include a Double Ray Tracing Intersect Engine, RT instance node transform, 64B RT node, Ray Tracing Tri Pair optimisation, change flags encoded in barycentrics to simplify detection of procedural nodes, BVH footprint improvement, and RT support for OBB and instance node intersection.

Previous leaks have indicated that RDNA 4 will overhaul AMD's RT hardware to provide a more competitive solution to Nvidia's market-leading RT technology. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX, the peak of RDNA 3 GPU architecture, struggles compared to the older RTX 3090 Ti in ray tracing workloads despite exceeding the rasterised performance of Nvidia's RTX 4080.

The most promising improvements are the Double Ray Tracing Intersect Engine, 64B RT node, and Ray Tracing Tri Pair Optimisation, which suggest significant ray tracing precision and performance enhancements.

Other improvements indicate general precision and efficiency enhancements, potentially aiming to match the greater RT fidelity ray reconstruction offers.

The AI hardware in RDNA 3 has been dedicated to AI workloads rather than RT or FSR image scaling. It isn't easy to draw meaningful conclusions until accurate RT benchmarks on RDNA 4 hardware are available. The PS5 Pro is expected to partially use RDNA 4 for boosted RT performance but will mainly be built around the RDNA 3 graphics architecture.

According to another leak from @Kepler_L2 earlier this month, mainstream RDNA 4 GPUs are not expected to be revealed until CES next year.

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