AMD RDNA4 with completely revamped ray tracing acceleration

The next-gen discrete graphics architecture gets promising updates for ray tracing.

Whatever AMD’s plans for RDNA4 are, it appears to be an important update in various fields, one of which is ray tracing hardware acceleration. AMD has competitive Radeon RX 7000 GPUs on the market, but they struggle to compete with NVIDIA’s ray tracing capabilities. It looks like this might or could have changed with the next-gen GPU architecture.

According to Kepler_L2, known for various AMD-related leaks, the company has been working on a ‘brand new’ Ray Tracing hardware acceleration block. Unlike RDNA3, which was only an improvement over RDNA2, AMD RDNA4 would feature an entirely different block for ray tracing.

It’s worth noting that the PlayStation 5 Pro is rumored to incorporate RDNA4 RT acceleration. As previously discussed, the PS4 Pro is expected to handle BVH8 (8-level bounding volume hierarchy) traversal shaders, whereas the current RT code can only manage a 4-level hierarchy. This implies that the AMD RDNA4 RT core could theoretically double the throughput per cycle.

However, the disappointing news is that AMD has reportedly canceled its plans for big Navi4 chips. Consequently, whatever RDNA4 RT has in store will only be available in mid-range to high-end models, leaving enthusiasts waiting for RDNA5.

Source: Kepler_L2 (Twitter/X)