AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 GPUs might have included ray tracing support, but its actual use case in games was quite limited because of the lack of any DLSS-like performance improvement feature. Well, it looks like the RDNA 2 based cards have a lot of untapped potential when it comes to ray tracing, as one modder has discovered.
Phillip Munkes on Twitter was able to modify his Radeon RX 6800 to outperform NVIDIA’s RTX 3080 in scenes with ray tracing. The performance improvement was observed in multiple scenes using Vulkan ray tracing (GitHub code here). Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia also chimed in, noting that the optimization is something developers might already be aware of, and we could be seeing that in future titles with RT support.
AMD’s RDNA 2 GPU architecture is of immense importance, considering that its present on both consoles and now PC as well. It’s clear that developers will be building for this particular architecture for the foreseeable future, and with AMD’s DLSS counterpart coming soon enough, we should be seeing some nice performance uplift on team red’s graphics cards. As of right now, AMD’s GPU ray tracing performance is mostly applicable when playing at a lower resolution than what those cards actually target with RT turned off. Let’s just hope that we see these optimizations make the cut before the more budget-focused GPUs are available on the market.