AMD is reportedly in the process of completely reviewing the way it manages ray tracing for its future RDNA 4 architecture and Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards.
Every week there is a rumor concerning the future generation of AMD graphics cards expected by the end of the year. While Nvidia is preparing its offensive on the high end, these future GPUs from its main competitor would focus on the mid-range to start.
If AMD still does very well in rasterization, sometimes better than its competitors, it urgently needed to step up its game in terms of ray tracing performance. The manufacturer could step into GPU fields like the GeForce RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti.
But if there is one area in which AMD still lags behind Nvidia, it is ray tracing. And it seems that the Radeon RX 8000s perform much better at this level.
A new architecture for ray tracing?
According to leaker Kepler on Twitter (X), the ray tracing of the RDNA 4 generation seems “brand new“. When replying to another user, he continues “RDNA3 RT was based on RDNA2 with some improvements. RDNA4 RT looks completely different“.
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Currently, AMD graphics cards of the RDNA 3 architecture largely exploit the ray tracing innovations of RDNA 2, always with hybrid operation: operations such as denoising or certain parts of the BVH algorithm are still managed on the software side, and not accelerated by hardware units like at Nvidia.
We can therefore expect a substantial update of the hardware dedicated to ray tracing with possibly additional and more specialized units to accelerate games using this very demanding rendering technique.
A preview in the PS5 Pro?
We know from reliable sources that the PS5 Pro will offer ray tracing performance at least double compared to the base PS5. Beyond an increase in computing units (and therefore ray accelerators), we could expect a preview of the RDNA 4 architecture on the console expected at the end of the year.
As with the PS5, AMD could thus reserve its future architecture for Sony before deploying it for the PC world. However, we remain in speculation on the basis of a few words in a tweet, we will have to wait for the official presentation of RDNA 4 to have more details.
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