Published in Graphics

AMD RDNA 4 architecture could feature all new Ray Tracing engine

by on03 May 2024
AMD RDNA 4 architecture could feature all new Ray Tracing engine


To offer much better performance

According to the latest rumor, AMD might implement a completely new Ray Tracing (RT) engine with its upcoming RDNA 4 architecture GPUs that are expected to debut with the Radeon RX 8000 graphics card series. The new RT engine could give a much higher performance compared to the current RDNA 3-based GPUs.

Although AMD managed to roll out a competitive product series with its Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards, it has been struggling to keep up with Nvidia when it comes to ray tracing support and performance. According to the latest rumor coming from Kepler_L2 over at Twitter, AMD is now working on a completely new Ray Tracing engine. AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs were using an improved RT engine from RDNA 2 architecture.

This rumor does make sense considering that the upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro console, which will come with a custom RDNA GPU, is expected to use BVH8 (8-level bounding volume hierarchy) traversal shaders, according to Videocardz.com. This suggests an RT engine taken from the RDNA 4 GPU, as the current RT code only supports a 4-level hierarchy. On the other hand, recent rumors suggested that AMD is going to mostly focus on the mid-range to high-end graphics card segment, while the enthusiast series will have to wait for RDNA 5 architecture.

AMD is expected to launch its RDNA 4-based graphics cards in the second half of the year, so we might hear more about them during Computex 2024 show.

 

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