Yesterday’s announcement by Microsoft regarding Xbox’s X-Series throws some light on what AMD will bring to the table with its next-generation RDNA2 architecture. Today’s Navi GPUs use a 7nm RDNA architecture, and the company has named the successor RDNA2 in its roadmaps.
RDNA2 will support variable-rate ray tracing and shading
We now know that at least some variants of RDNA 2-based GPUs will be compatible with ray tracing. We also learned that variable speed shading technology will be a feature of the architecture. Both features are already compatible with NVIDIA’s Turing architecture.
Ray tracing and variable rate shading will be at the heart of the design of the RDNA2 graphics architecture that will bring the next generation of AMD GPUs to life.
As we know, Microsoft’s new console uses a semi-custom SoC with an AMD CPU and GPU, and the latter uses a completely new RDNA2 architecture. On this basis, the new console and the next graphics cards will be able to use hardware-accelerated ray tracing and technologies such as variable-speed shading.
Variable Rate Shading (VRS) is an API-level feature that allows GPUs to conserve resources by shielding certain areas of a scene at a slower speed than the others, with no noticeable difference to the viewer. Microsoft has developed two levels of VRS for its DirectX 12 API, Level 1 is currently supported by the Turing and Intel Gen11 architectures, while Level 2 is only supported by Turing. The current RDNA architecture does not support either level.
“The combination of VRS and dynamic render resolution will be critical to ensure that new generation consoles can play 4K games smoothly and even have 8K compatibility.
We could see the first RDNA2 graphics cards in the second half of 2020. We will keep you informed.
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