AMD has revealed its Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT graphics cards, which boast significant improvements in encoding quality, ray tracing, and efficiency. The new GPUs are powered by the RDNA 4 architecture and promise better performance in real-world use cases.
Key to these upgrades is AMD’s improved GPU encoders, which have long been criticized for poor video encoding quality when used with popular formats like H.264 and HEVC. However, the company claims that its RDNA 4 GPUs can now achieve a 25% gain in H.264 low-latency encode quality and an 11% improvement in HEVC encoding.
In addition to encoding enhancements, AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs also feature improved ray tracing capabilities, including two intersection engines, a new ray transform block, and an expanded BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy). This should result in faster ray-triangle intersections and overall better performance in this area.
The compute engine has been optimized for improved efficiency, with enhancements such as PCIe 5.0 x16 interfaces and 256-bit memory buses using GDDR6. The GPUs also come equipped with 16GB of VRAM, which should be sufficient for most modern games.
However, the display engine remains unchanged from RDNA 3, limiting its capabilities to DisplayPort 2.1 with a maximum bandwidth of UHBR 13.5. HDMI 2.1b is also supported, but power consumption and frame scheduling remain unchanged.
In terms of competition, Nvidia’s RTX 5080 still holds an advantage in terms of die area and transistor efficiency, but AMD’s RX 9070 XT claims to be faster than the RTX 5070 Ti despite having a smaller die size. The real-world performance implications of these upgrades will depend on various factors.
AMD is expected to release its new driver-based frame generation technology, AFMF 2.1, which promises improved image quality and enhanced features like Radeon Image Sharpening. Availability for the RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 is set for March 6th, with board partners including ASUS, Gigabyte, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX.
Source: https://www.techspot.com/news/106986-amd-rdna-4-gpus-bring-major-encoding-ray.html