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RDNA 3 Ray Tracing

Last Updated on January 4, 2023
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RDNA 3 came to the market with big changes. AMD has packed these GPUs with powerful features. This has allowed the series to stand out and battle directly with Nvidia flagship GPUs.

One of these aspects is ray tracing. The raw power of the RDNA 3 architecture gives the GPUs never-seen-before ray tracing performance in AMD.

In this article, we will deep-dive into these improvements. One of the most significant innovations in the RX 7000 series is the inclusion of chipsets. These were key to Ryzen’s success in 2019. However, the design of the chipsets in the RX 7000 series is quite different from those found in Ryzen and other AMD CPUs.

The RX 7000 series GPUs feature a single die with all the cores and multiple dies with one GDDR6 memory controller and 16MB of Infinity Cache each. This is in contrast to the multiple dies for cores and an additional die for I/O and other tasks found in some other GPUs. All of this translates into a wider memory bus and infinity cache; two main features when it comes to gaming.

Does RDNA 3 have better ray tracing?

Yes, thanks to the architectural change seen on RDNA 3 the AMD 7000-series GPUs have the best performance seen in an AMD GPU so far. Even though they’re not quite yet at the Nvidia level, we can still appreciate a performance difference between the two competitors in ray tracing-demanding games. It looks like AMD is closing the gaps little by little. We might get to the day when the difference isn’t even noticeable.

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RDNA 3 features larger vector graphics processing units (VGPRs) which allow for 1.5 times as many rays in flight. Additionally, there are optimizations to reduce the number of instructions needed for bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal. As well as specialized box-sorting algorithms that can improve efficiency.

These improvements, along with higher frequency and more Ray Accelerators, have led AMD to offer up to a 1.8x increase in performance for ray tracing compared to RDNA 2. This should close the gap between AMD and Nvidia’s Ampere architecture.

However, Nvidia has also made advancements in its ray tracing hardware for Ada Lovelace GPUs. So RDNA 3 can’t really match the performance of Nvidia’s RTX 40-series GPUs.

Camilo is a contributor for PC Guide. He's been into tech since he was a teen, surfing through the web and local stores trying to find the cheapest way to play the latest Half-Life on his old Windows