AMD has directly confirmed that the Radeon RX 7000 will use the new architecture it offers “enhanced ray tracing capabilities”, or whatever it is, they will involve profound changes at the hardware level to offer excellent performance when working with that technology. This decision confirms what I have told you many times that ray tracing is no longer the future, but the present, and that NVIDIA eventually made the right decision when it bet on it in 2018 with GeForce RTX 20.

Those of you who read us daily remember that we have spoken on this subject more than once. amd completely skipped ray tracing with the Radeon RX 5000and decided only to speed up the technology with the Radeon RX 6000. However, Sunnyvale’s model with RDNA 2 architecture had significant limitations in terms of speeding up beam tracking because:

• Each unit of beam tracking acceleration share resources with texturing engineswhich means that both cannot work at the same time.
• These ray tracing accelerators work with intersections of rays and triangles and frame anchors, but not with intersections of BVH, which are one step ahead of them and are processed by shaders.
• They cannot work asynchronouslywhich leaves us with a very serious problem, given what we said in the previous point.

AMD has not clearly specified what innovations it will implement at the architectural level to improve ray tracing performance with the Radeon RX 7000, but I imagine that these changes will focus on fix the three shortcomings we just saw. In any case, we do not have much left to get out of doubt, because the introduction 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 to bet hybrid approach, which means they will offer good performance in rasterization and ray tracing. This is understandable, because we are still far from achieving a level of performance that allows us to draw games with complex geometry using only ray tracing. Quake II RTX is a good example because, despite its simplicity, the implementation of NVIDIA ray tracing is so intense that the game is very challenging.

Radeon RX 7000 will made in 5nm nodethey will use modular design in their most powerful versions and a monolithic core for mid-range models, use a completely new architecture that introduces profound changes to both the computing unit and graphics pipeline, more endless caching and offers up to 50% performance improvements on watt consumed.

If all goes according to plan, the Radeon RX 7000 will run at about the same time as the GeForce RTX 40. Epic settlement is imminent between AMD and NVIDIA in the field of graphics cards for ordinary consumers and it seems that it 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.