Huge advancements! Leaker reveals AMD’s RDNA 4 ray tracing improvements
AMD RDNA 4 Ray Tracing features leaked – AMD has completely rethought how they do ray tracing
AMD’s ray tracing performance is set to improve massively with the release of their RDNA 4 graphics cards. @Kepler_L2 on Twitter/X has revealed a list of ray tracing focused enhancements that are coming to AMD’s next-generation GPUs. Many of these changes also appear to be coming to PlayStation 5 Pro. This makes these advancements important for both the PC and console gaming markets.
Below is a list of what’s reportedly changing with RDNA 4, and how we think it will impact the ray tracing performance of future AMD GPUs. Note that detailed descriptions of these changes aren’t available as part of this leak. As such, our analysis is merely guesswork.
RDNA 4 Ray Tracing Improvements
- Double Ray Tracing Intersect Engine: This could increase parallelism within AMD’s ray tracing engine, boosting its performance
- RT instance node transformation: New feature that should enable more efficient ray tracing calculations
- 64B RT node: Unknown Improvement
- Ray Tracing Tri-Pair Optimisation: May decrease the computational requirements of ray triangle intersections
- Change flags encoded in barycentrics to simplify detection of procedural nodes: Unknown improvement
- BVH Footprint Improvement: Efficiency gains cab be achieved with improved Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) structures If BVH footprints can be reduced without negative consequences, computational loads can be reduced. (Fewer calculations are needed, as fewer rays intersect with BVH structures unecessarily)
- RT Support for OOB and Instance Node Intersection: Unknown improvement
Some of the new RT features coming with gfx12/RDNA4. Most if not all of these should be in the PS5 Pro too 🙂 pic.twitter.com/AO5HaxJlMK
— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) July 21, 2024
Based on this list of improvements, AMD is taking a multi-layers approach to boosting their ray tracing performance. Weak points in their ray tracing architecture appear to be AMD’s primary focus. Beyond that, AMD is working to boost the overall efficiency of their ray tracing structures. This should help close the gap between AMD and Nvidia’s relative ray tracing performance. Regardless, it remains to be seen whether or not these changes are enough to make AMD’s ray tracing performance or par or better than Nvidia’s.
AMD is hoping to make major leaps forward with RDNA 4. Even so, rumour has it that AMD will not be releasing high-end RDNA 4 GPUs. That means that we shouldn’t expect an RDNA 4 based RTX 5090 competitor.
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