AMD RDNA 4 GPUs to Feature Enhanced Ray Tracing for RX 8000 & PS5 Pro

AMD RDNA 4 GPUs to Feature Enhanced Ray Tracing for RX 8000 & PS5 Pro

AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs are set to introduce a new and improved Ray Tracing engine for Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards and the Sony PS5 Pro.

Reports indicate that AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs will bring significant changes to the Ray Tracing engine. These enhanced RT blocks will be integrated into GPUs powering both the Radeon RX 8000 and Sony PS5 Pro, both expected to debut in the coming year.

Recently, @Kepler_L2 shared additional details about the ray tracing enhancements coming to RDNA 4. The changes include:

• 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 in a challenging position against NVIDIA, which has been a generation ahead in ray tracing support. While AMD introduced its first-generation ray tracing support in 2020 with the RDNA 2 graphics family (Radeon RX 6000), NVIDIA had already launched its Turing (GeForce RTX 20) series in 2018.

Despite launching a year after NVIDIA, the RDNA 2 GPUs struggled against the Turing GPUs and found it even more challenging to compete with the Ampere (GeForce RTX 30) lineup. With the current Ada (GeForce RTX 40) GPUs, NVIDIA remains significantly ahead of AMD’s latest Radeon RX 7000 (RDNA 3) series.

The new RDNA 4 GPUs are expected to close this gap, potentially offering strong competition in ray tracing performance. Rumors also suggest that the Sony PS5 Pro will take full advantage of these advancements, given the intense competition in the console market. Microsoft and Sony are constantly battling for the best hardware performance and features. The PS5 Pro is expected to use a custom RDNA GPU, incorporating elements from RDNA 4 such as BVH8 traversal, while RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPUs currently only support BVH4 traversal.

According to recent reports, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs are anticipated to debut in early 2025 with the next-generation Radeon RX 8000 graphics cards. So far, only two chips, Navi 48 and Navi 44, have been identified, known internally as GFX1201 and GFX1200. If the 2025 release timeline holds, it will be some time before AMD officially announces these GPUs to the market.

AMD RDNA Generational GPU Lineup