Although AMD graphics cards offer ray tracing support , in reality this is not the brand’s strong point. If you want to take advantage of this feature, your best bet is to opt for NVIDIA hardware, which is far more capable in this area. With this in mind, AMD should improve this aspect with RDNA 4, the brand’s future architecture. Already, we’ve had a sneak preview of the integrated features that will boost card performance!
RDNA 4: what features will improve ray tracing performance?
The leak comes from @kepler_l2, a reliable source. The latter shares a screenshot mentioning several elements that will be part of AMD’s new ray tracing engine:
- Double Ray Tracing Intersect Engine
- RT instance node transformation
- 64B RT node
- Ray Tracing Tri-Pair Optimisation
- Change flags encoded in barycentrics to simplify detection of procedural nodes
- BVH Footprint Improvement
- RT Support for OOB and Instance Node Intersection
The full benefits of these features are not yet known. But in broad terms, they aim to improve ray tracing performance. They do this either by processing rays in parallel, by reducing memory usage, or by improving the computational efficiency of different rays in a scene. In addition to improving performance, the impact on the shader engine would also be reduced.
Another interesting piece of information to consider is that these functionalities will also be present in the graphics section of the PS5 Pro. As for the launch of RDNA 4 cards, not before 2025.
