Since NVIDIA released the Turing Turing architecture RTX 20 series, the PC platform has supported ray tracing for 4 years. NVIDIA has always been very active in ray tracing games, and ray tracing performance is currently leading.
AMD's support for ray tracing has always been slightly conservative. The RDNA2 architecture of the RX 6000 series has officially added the hardware ray tracing acceleration unit, two years later than NVIDIA.
According to AMD's official information, a special "ray accelerator" (Ray Accelerator) is designed in the RNDA 2 architecture, referred to as RA. A set is set in each computing unit (CU), which is basically the same as the designs in Microsoft Xbox Series X/S and Sony PS5.
flagship RX 6900 XT has a complete 80 sets of RAs, while RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 are 72 sets and 60 sets respectively. Tests released by
AMD show that the hardware ray tracing acceleration of RX 6000 is 13.8 times faster than software rendering. However, compared with NVIDIA, the performance of A-card ray tracing is still quite different.
ray tracing performance can be said to be the weakest link in AMD graphics cards in the past four years. The good news for is that in the RDNA3 architecture RX 7000 at the end of this year, not only will the performance of raster gaming will double, but the RT ray tracing performance will also be improved more, which is more than doubled.
And while all this is improved, the TBP of RX 7000 is amazing - meaning high energy efficiency. After all, AMD has previously made it clear that the performance ratio per watt of the RDNA3 architecture has been improved by more than 50%.
