AMD’s Next-Gen UDNA 5 Gaming GPUs Could Potentially Bridge The Ray-Tracing Performance Gap With NVIDIA, Indicates Extensive Patent Filings

It seems like AMD has big plans for its next-gen “UDNA 5” GPUs, as a set of patent filings over the last two years indicate that Team Red plans to upscale its “ray-tracing” game.

AMD Speeds Up RT Efforts By Intensifying Patent Activity & Hiring Spree; Plans To Level the Competition With NVIDIA

When you look at how rapidly AMD has changed its approach to consumer GPUs, it becomes clear that the firm wants the “lion’s share” in the mainstream market. We have already seen a glimpse of it with the company’s RDNA 4 GPU architecture, especially with how the RX 9070 series attracted massive consumer interest, mainly due to its perf/$ ratio. Out of all the other elements, it seems like AMD will particularly focus on its RT capabilities with the next-gen “UDNA 5” architecture, as summarized by the Redditor @MrMPFR, who managed to summarize AMD’s RT-focused patent filings from the last two years.

It is important to note that Team Red’s focus on ray-tracing is not just intended for the PC market. AMD has to cater to adequate performance of Sony’s PlayStation consoles, and RT plays an integral part in bringing the extra FPS without stressing much on hardware capabilities. The Redditor claims that, based on what patent filings have disclosed, AMD could achieve RT-performance parity with NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPU lineup, calling it the “Maxwell moment” for Team Red.

One of the more compelling pieces of information revealed in the patents is AMD’s approach to BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) management, which firstly involves compression of delta instances. This is done by finding BVH similarities between graphical objects on the scene and then compressing them to reduce usage and CPU overhead. Apart from this, there’s also mention of turbocharged ray traversal and intersections, which refers to the detection of which graphical objects are to be rendered.

Since the Reddit post delves into multiple parameters and updates to contribute towards RT performance, diving into everything individually is going to make this post much longer, but we do suggest checking it out if ray-tracing is your thing. However, the TL;DR with the post is that AMD is ramping up its efforts to upscale its native RT technology, to the point that NVIDIA might need to introduce a major architectural leap to maintain its dominance in the consumer GPU market.

Similarly, with Sony’s Project Amethyst, AMD plans to develop its advanced path tracing solutions, potentially leveraging neural rendering (AI) to compete with NVIDIA’s resource-intensive ReSTIR technology. Ultimately, this “RT race” will benefit the end consumer, who’ll likely find better performance and features with next-gen GPUs.