RDNA 4 ray tracing termed "brand new" giving hope that AMD might finally be able to compete with NVIDIA

The Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, AMD’s first cards with hardware-accelerated ray tracing launched in 2020. Sadly, the RX 6000 boards were not great at ray tracing compared to the RTX 30 GPUs. And while AMD has managed a substantial performance bump with the RX 7000 boards, Team Red still lags behind NVIDIA.

That said, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs might finally give NVIDIA some competition in the ray tracing department, as, according to a new leak from serial leaker @Kepler_L2, RDNA 4 “RT looks brand new”. The leaker further claims that, unlike RDNA 3 RT which was based on RDNA 2, RDNA 4 “looks completely different”.

In other words, AMD could have made significant architectural changes to RDNA 4 GPUs to improve ray tracing performance. One of these possible changes could be the removal of BVH4 traversal in favor of BVH8 for RDNA 4, potentially increasing throughput. BVH or Bounding Volume Hierarchy is a technique used to make ray tracing less taxing. So, the better a GPU can handle BVH traversal, the faster the RT.

Needless to say, RDNA 4’s completely new RT could result in a massive performance advantage. Moore’s Law Is Dead claimed previously that the PS5 Pro could have some RDNA 4 RT tech, allowing the console to have 2 to 4 times better RT performance than the vanilla PS5 (Available on Amazon). So, assuming AMD has outfitted RDNA 4 with a brand new RT solution that doesn’t borrow from previous architectures, the PS5 Pro’s performance uplift claim seems rather likely.

Before we wrap this up, it is important to remember that we have no way of knowing the actual ray-tracing performance of RDNA 4 at this point. So, take the rumors detailed here as strictly non-official and highly likely to change.