Despite the Radeon RX 7000 series offering welcome generational improvements to ray tracing performance, AMD remains behind the curve. The manufacturer is not one to remain on the backfoot without a fight though. With this in mind, Team Red is allegedly preparing a host of new features for its RDNA 4 GPU architecture to remedy this particular weak point. Better still, it appears that PC and console players alike will stand to benefit.
In fairness to AMD, its Radeon RX 7000 series does contain some of the best graphics cards on the market today in our eyes. While the company’s high-end RDNA 3 offerings are largely great, the mid-range Radeon RX 7900 GRE shines brightest of the bunch in my eyes. For all their many positive qualities, though, the sore spot of ray tracing somewhat spoils an otherwise solid set of cards. Thankfully, RDNA 4 could be the silicon shakeup we’ve all been waiting for.
Over on X, regular Radeon leaker Kepler_L2 shared several new ray tracing features that will debut with RDNA 4 GPUs. The list also apparently contains other improvements, unrelated to ray tracing, obfuscated by black bars.
Sadly, none of these features come paired with descriptions. However, the list isn’t entirely cryptic. For example, ‘BVH Footprint Improvement’ likely refer to changes in how RDNA 4 GPUs will handle Bounding Volume Hierarchies, a key component of ray traced rendering. Their finer details, though, will remain a mystery until further leaks shine light on them or AMD pulls back the curtain.
Following previous reports that RDNA 4 will be much better at ray tracing more generally, it’s promising to see fairly substantial feature lists like this materialise. It’s just such a shame that AMD dropped what would’ve been its flagship GPU with 200 CUs, to really show off any architectural improvements.
It’s too early to tell whether the list above (and any other unknown additions to the ray tracing pipeline) will be enough to help RDNA 4 to hold its own against the Nvidia RTX 50 series. However, we can’t wait to see what AMD has in store for its Radeon RX 8000 series and how the company potentially plans to deploy its next GPU architecture in the PlayStation 5 Pro.
In the meantime, give our Radeon RX 7900 XTX review a read. It’s the best AMD has to offer right now in terms of performance, and could give us a ballpark performance estimate for midrange RDNA 4 pixel pushers.