Although the AMD RDNA4 RX 8000 series does not have a flagship product, its price/performance ratio makes it a highly anticipated release, including practical upgrades in areas like ray tracing. According to reports, there are at least seven key upgrades worth noting:
Doubling the Ray Tracing Interaction Engine: This improvement enhances the GPU's ability to handle parallel processing of light.
Optimized Ray Tracing Instance Code Conversion: GPUs can now process geometry more efficiently, including transformations such as conversion, rotation, and scaling.
64-bit Ray Tracing Nodes: These nodes boost processing efficiency while reducing video memory and memory consumption.
Tri-Optimization of Ray Tracing: This reduces the computational load required to calculate ray-triangle interactions.
Simplified Mark Coding for Centroid Coordinates: This change streamlines the detection of program nodes.
Improved BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy): Enhancements in BVH contribute to better overall performance.
OBB (Oriented Bounding Box) and Instance Node Interactions with Ray Tracing: The use of smaller, more precise, and efficient bounding boxes enhances performance.
AMD has been relatively secretive about RDNA4, with no roadmap or release date currently available. Speculation suggests it might launch early next year.
Interestingly, the PS5 Pro, expected to be released in November this year, will continue to use the RDNA3 GPU architecture but will incorporate some of the RDNA4's ray tracing features, ahead of AMD's official release.
