AMD has directly confirmed that the Radeon RX 7000 will use a new architecture that will offer “enhanced ray tracing capabilities”, or what is the same, that they will incorporate profound changes at the hardware level to offer superior performance when working with said technology. This decision confirms what I have told you many times, that ray tracing is no longer the future, it is the present, and that in the end NVIDIA made the right decision when it bet on it in 2018 with the GeForce RTX 20.
Those of you who read us daily will remember that we have already talked about this topic on more than one occasion. amd completely skipped ray tracing with the Radeon RX 5000and only opted to accelerate said technology with the Radeon RX 6000. However, the model introduced by the Sunnyvale firm with the RDNA 2 architecture had significant limitations when it came to accelerating ray tracing because:
- Each unit of ray tracing acceleration share resources with texturing engineswhich means that both cannot work simultaneously.
- Those ray tracing acceleration units work with ray-triangle intersections and frame anchors, but not with BVH traversal intersections, which are a step prior to those, and are handled by shaders.
- They cannot work asynchronouslywhich leaves us with a very serious problem if we take into account what we have said in the previous point.
AMD has not clearly specified what innovations it will introduce at the architectural level to improve ray tracing performance with the Radeon RX 7000, but I imagine that these changes will be focused on correct those three shortcomings that we have just seen. In any case, there is not much left for us to get out of doubt, since the presentation of the Radeon RX 7000 will take place between September and October.
Radeon RX 7000: more powerful and efficient
These new graphics cards will continue betting on a hybrid approach, which means that they will offer good performance in rasterization and ray tracing. This is understandable, as we are still a long way from reaching a power level that will allow us to render games with complex geometry using only ray tracing. Quake II RTX is a good example, as despite its simplicity, NVIDIA’s implementation of ray tracing is so intensive that the game is very demanding.
The Radeon RX 7000 will be manufactured at the 5nm nodethey will use a modular design in their most powerful versions and a monolithic core in the mid-range models, they will use a completely new architecture that will introduce profound changes in both the computing unit and the graphics pipeline, they will have a greater amount of infinite cache and will offer up to a 50% improvement in performance per watt consumed.
If all goes according to plan, the Radeon RX 7000 will launch around the same time as the GeForce RTX 40. An epic showdown looms between AMD and NVIDIA in the field of general consumer graphics cards, and it seems that things could be very close. I hope to be able to test many models and give you an unbiased view of the actual performance of each of them.
