AMD RDNA 4 GPUs are expected to feature a brand new and enhanced Ray Tracing engine for Radeon RX 8000 & Sony PS5 Pro.
AMD's Radeon RX 8000 & Sony PS5 Pro To Benefit From Enhanced Ray Tracing Engine Featured On AMD RDNA 4 GPU Architecture
Previously, it was reported that AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs would feature major changes within its Ray Tracing engine. These enhanced RT blocks were to be incorporated in GPUs that would go on to power Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards and Sony PS5 Pro, both of which are expected to debut in the coming year.
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
Now, @Kepler_L2 has shared some more information regarding these ray tracing enhancements coming to RDNA 4. These changes include the following:
- Double Ray Tracing Intersect Engine
- RT Instance Node Transform
- 64B RT Node
- Ray Tracing Tri-Pair Optimization
- Change flags encoded in barycentric to simplify the detection of procedural nodes
- BVH Footprint Improvement
- RT support for OBB and Instance Node Intersection
AMD has been on an uphill battle against NVIDIA who have been a generation ahead of them when it comes to ray tracing support. Although the first generation of ray tracing support came to AMD in 2020 with the debut of the RDNA 2 graphics family (Radeon RX 6000), NVIDIA was introduced back in 2018 with its Turing (GeForce RTX 20) lineup.
Despite launching a year after NVIDIA, the RDNA 2 GPUs lacked in front of the Turing GPUs and had an even more difficult 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 might have a strong offering when it comes to Ray Tracing performance. Earlier rumors have also indicated that the Sony PS5 Pro will take full advantage of these Ray Tracing enhancements since the console market is in a heated battle with the likes of Microsoft and Sony battling out for the best hardware performance & capabilities that each of their flagship offerings has to offer. Sony's PS5 console is going to use a custom RDNA GPU with elements of the RDNA 4 GPU such as BVH8 traversal while RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs currently only support BVH4 traversal.
As per 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 making, the Navi 48 and Navi 44, both of which have been identified on multiple occasions as GFX1201 & GFX1200. If the 2025 release dates are true, then it will be some time before AMD officially announces these GPUs to the market.
AMD RDNA Generational GPU Lineup
| Radeon Lineup | Radeon RX 5000 | Radeon RX 6000 | Radeon RX 7000 | Radeon RX 8000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU Architecture | RDNA 1 | RDNA 2 | RDNA 3 / RDNA 2 | RDNA 4 |
| Process Node | 7nm | 7nm | 5nm/6nm | 4nm? |
| GPU Family | Navi 1X | Navi 2X | Navi 3X | Navi 4X |
| Flagship GPU | N/A | Navi 21 (5120 SPs) | Navi 31 (6144 SPs) | Navi 41 (Cancelled?) |
| High-End GPU | Navi 10 (2560 SPs) | Navi 22 (2560 SPs) | Navi 32 (4096 SPs) | Navi 48 (4 SEs?) |
| Mid-Tier GPU | Navi 12 (2560 SPs) | Navi 23 (2048 SPs) | Navi 33 (2048 SPs) | N/A? |
| Entry-Tier GPU | Navi 14 (1536 SPs) | Navi 24 (1024 SPs) | Navi 34 (1024 SPs)? | Navi 44 (2 SEs?) |
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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