AMD is claiming big performance gains for its newly-announced 9000 Series GPU lineup, claiming “significant gen over gen gains in Ray tracing titles”.

In a recent AMD press briefing, Scott Olschewsky, Product Management Director at AMD, discussed all the new and exciting features that RNDA 4 will bring to life through their upcoming RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cards. While there was plenty to pick over, AMD’s claims of RT performance were certainly on the more exciting side – especially when you factor in Nvidia’s recent dominance in this space.

During the briefing, Scott was quick to state that “Improving Ray tracing performance was identified as a critical design goal very early on in the life cycle of RDNA 4”, following up with claims of 2X performance gains when compared against last year’s models. He justified this particular goal by highlighting that “the trend of Ray tracing has become more widely adopted by game developers”, emphasizing the fact that modern AAA games require strong RT performance to run at optimal levels.

AMD claims 2X performance gains in Ray tracing

As you can see from the slide above, AMD’s new RDNA 4 architecture will benefit from 3rd Generation Ray tracing accelerators – which now feature a second Intersection Engine, which effectively “doubles the throughput for both raybox and raytriangle testing.”

In addition to this, AMD has also introduced a dedicated hardware block for Ray Transform, alongside a new accelerated feature called ‘Object Oriented boxes’. Both of these improvements will allow for much more efficient ray traversal through the geometry, allowing RDNA 4 GPUs to make better use of the available VRAM capacity and bandwidth.

AMD claims that all this will result in “twice the Ray tracing throughput versus their previous generation”. We’ll be taking the claims with a pinch of salt for now, however, early leaks show positive signs for the new GPU lineup – and with Nvidia missing a trick with their own Blackwell launch, now could be the perfect time for AMD to strike.

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Charlie Noon

Charlie is the Affiliate manager for PC Guide. He has a vast understanding of most PC hardware and consumer essentials, using his knowledge to provide the best products and the biggest deals.