New AMD patents hint at significant progress in ray tracing technology

AMD is actively catching up with NVIDIA in ray tracing and preparing for the next stage of the graphics market battle. As Reddit user MrMPFR discovered, the company has filed dozens of patents related to ray tracing and related technologies - all of which could form the basis for future graphics cards based on the UDNA architecture.

Despite the fact that Ray Tracing has traditionally been AMD's weak point, the Radeon RX 9000 series has almost caught up with the RTX 5000 in terms of performance. In particular, according to TechSpot tests, the RX 9070 XT shows the level of the RTX 5070 Ti in most games. However, in the most demanding projects, such as Alan Wake II or Black Myth: Wukong, AMD video cards are still inferior.

According to the patents, the company is working on improving BVH, developing new ray tracing methods, and creating analogues of NVIDIA technologies like RTX Mega Geometry.

AMD has also hired experts from NVIDIA and Intel. Some of the developments may already be implemented in RDNA 4, but the main changes are expected with the arrival of UDNA, the next-generation architecture. It is rumored to be included in the PlayStation 6.

In response, NVIDIA is preparing the Rubin architecture, but there are no details about its features yet.