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AMD may finally have an answer to Nvidia’s dominance

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RX 7900 XTX installed in a test bench.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

Although AMD makes some of the best graphics cards, there’s one thing it has always struggled with when compared to Nvidia: ray tracing. Even though RDNA 3 brought some improvements in that regard, Nvidia remains the king of ray tracing. However, a new leak about the upcoming RDNA 4 generation tells us that things might be about to change — and the PlayStation 5 Pro might already benefit.

The scoop comes from Kepler_L2 on X (formerly Twitter), who shared a list of ray tracing features that are being added with RDNA 4. The leaker also claims that most of these should be available in the PS5 Pro, which won’t run on RDNA 4 entirely, but is said to utilize parts of it to supplement the RDNA 3.5 chip that it’ll house.

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What’s new, then? Kepler_L2’s intel claims that RDNA 4 will bring major changes to RDNA’s ray tracing, including a double ray tracing intersect engine, ray tracing instance node transform, a 64-byte ray tracing node, tri-pair optimization, BVH footprint improvement, and ray tracing support for OBB and instance node intersection.

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All of these features relate to various boosts to the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of ray tracing operations in RDNA 4. It sounds like ray tracing in RDNA 4 will be more precise and efficient, resulting in better frames per second (fps) and improved visuals. These improvements are much-needed, too. Although the RTX 4080 offers about the same performance as the RX 7900 XTX, the Nvidia card still wins in ray tracing. Considering that AMD may not even aim to have a high-end GPU to offer in RDNA 4, ray tracing improvements would give it more of an edge against Nvidia in this generation.

Kepler_L2 joins the long list of leakers who confirm that AMD won’t even beat its own RDNA 3 flagship with its next-gen cards. The Twitter user revealed that the best RDNA 4 GPU will be “at most in between the RX 7900 XT and the XTX.” And although the improvements to ray tracing are clear, Kepler_L2 didn’t make any definite statements as to whether AMD will now be as good as Nvidia at ray tracing.

Ray tracing aside, it’s looking increasingly like Nvidia’s RTX 50-series will have the GPU to beat this generation. History will repeat itself, as the RTX 4090 is unmatched. In a battle between Blackwell and RDNA 4, AMD might only be able to rival the RTX 5070 — but with better ray tracing and reasonable pricing, it could really rock that mainstream GPU market.

Kepler_L2 also reiterated a rumor we’ve already heard before — that AMD may hold off the RDNA 4 announcement until CES 2025. Such a late launch could prove to be disastrous, but perhaps with solid performance, RDNA 4 may still turn out to be a success. Remember that all of the above is based strictly on rumors. AMD is yet to reveal anything solid about RDNA 4.

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Monica J. White
Monica J. White
Computing Writer
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
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