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AMD RDNA 4 GPUs Get Enhanced Ray Tracing Architecture with Dual RT Intersect Engine, Coming Soon to Radeon RX 8000 and Sony PS5 Pro

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AMD RDNA 4 GPUs Get Enhanced Ray Tracing Architecture with Dual RT Intersect Engine, Coming Soon to Radeon RX 8000 and Sony PS5 Pro

AMD RDNA 4 GPUs are expected to get a brand new and improved Ray Tracing engine for the Radeon RX 8000 and Sony PS5 Pro.

AMD’s Radeon RX 8000 and Sony PS5 Pro Benefit from Enhanced Ray Tracing Engine on AMD RDNA 4 GPU Architecture

AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs were previously reported to feature major changes within its Ray Tracing engine. These improved RT blocks would reportedly be included in GPUs powering the Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards and Sony PS5 Pro, both of which are expected to debut next year.

Now @Kepler_L2 has shared some more information about these ray tracing improvements coming to RDNA 4. These changes include the following:

  • Dual Ray Tracing Intersect Engine
  • RT Instance Node Transformation
  • 64B RT junction
  • Ray Tracing Tri-Pair Optimization
  • Change flags encoded in barycentric to simplify detection of procedural nodes
  • Improving the BVH footprint
  • RT support for OBB and Instance Node Intersection

AMD is in an uphill battle with NVIDIA, who is a generation ahead of them when it comes to ray tracing support. While the first generation of ray tracing support came to AMD in 2020 with the introduction of the RDNA 2 family of graphics (Radeon RX 7000), NVIDIA was introduced in 2018 with its Turing (GeForce RTX 20) series.

Despite launching a year after NVIDIA, the RDNA 2 GPUs still lagged behind the Turing GPUs and had an even harder time competing against the Ampere (GeForce RTX 30) lineup. With the current Ada (GeForce RTX 40) GPUs, NVIDIA is still miles ahead of AMD’s latest Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA 4) lineup.

With these new changes coming to RDNA 4 GPUs, AMD may have a strong offering when it comes to Ray Tracing performance. Previous rumors have also indicated that the Sony PS5 Pro will take full advantage of these Ray Tracing improvements, as the console market is in a heated battle with companies like Microsoft and Sony vying to bring out the best hardware performance and capabilities that each of their flagship offerings has to offer. Sony’s PS5 console is set to use a custom RDNA GPU that features elements of the RDNA 4 GPU such as BVH8 traversal, while the RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs currently only support BVH4 traversal.

AMD RDNA 4

According to the latest reports, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs are expected to debut in early 2025 with the next-gen Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards. So far, we only know about two chips in the works, the Navi 48 and Navi 44, both of which have been identified multiple times as the GFX1201 & GFX1200. If the 2025 release dates are accurate, it will be a while before AMD officially announces these GPUs to the market.

AMD RDNA Generational GPU lineup

Radeon Series Radeon RX 5000 Radeon RX 6000 Radeon RX 7000 Radeon RX 8000
GPU architecture RDNA-1 RDNA2 RDNA3 / RDNA2 RDNA-4
Process node 7nm 7nm 5nm/6nm 5nm/3nm?
GPU family Navi-1X Navi2X Navi 3X Navi4X
Flagship GPU n/a Navi 21 (5120 SP’s) Navi 31 (6144 SP’s) Navi 41 (Cancelled?)
High-performance GPU Navi 10 (2560 SP’s) Navi 22 (2560 SP’s) Navi 32 (4096 SP’s) Navi 48 (4 SE’s?)
Mid-range GPU Navi 12 (2560 SP’s) Navi 23 (2048 SP’s) Navi 33 (2048 SP’s) N/A?
Entry-level GPU Navi 14 (1536 SP’s) Navi 24 (1024 SP’s) Navi 34 (1024 SP’s)? Navi 44 (2 SE’s?)

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