RDNA 4 versus RDNA 3 - all the significant improvements as outlined by AMD

RDNA 4 is the latest gaming GPU architecture, powering the new Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT. It paves the way for Neural Rendering to become significant for gaming in the coming years.

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RDNA 4 doubles the AI performance compared to RDNA 3, with 2nd Generation AI Accelerators supporting FP8, which powers AMD's new custom Super Resolution model for FSR 4. Unlike previous versions of FSR, FSR 4 is exclusive to RDNA 4 as it leverages the latest AI hardware to deliver a massive improvement to image quality when compared to the non-AI FSR 3.1 - a big step to leveling the playing field with NVIDIA DLSS.

The other big update arrives with RDNA 4's 3rd Generation Raytracing Accelerators, which doubles the ray-tracing throughput per Compute Unit with dual ray intersection calculations and more optimizations like compressing BVH sizes and new technology like 'Oriented Bounding Boxes' that improves performance at the hardware level.

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This is excellent news because ray tracing is one area where Radeon has fallen behind. AMD was clear to confirm that double the throughput doesn't mean double the performance, but it does mean that the Radeon RX 9070 XT will be a better RT GPU than even the RDNA 3 flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX. With RDNA 4, AMD's mid-range GPUs will finally be able to deliver impressive ray-tracing performance.

For those wondering about non-ray-tracing improvements, RDNA 4's architecture includes an enhanced memory subsystem with 3rd Gen Infinity Cache, improved scalar units, dynamic register allocation, increased efficiency, and higher clock speeds than RDNA 3.

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RDNA 4 introduces new shader reordering similar to NVIDIA's Shader Execution Reordering (SER) for the GeForce RTX 40 Series. This offers better memory management by allowing shader requests to be carried out more efficiently and not in some strict order. AMD notes that this will improve RDNA 4's performance in many workloads, not just ray-tracing.

The flagship Radeon RX 9070 XT is built on an optimized monolithic design using TSMC's 4nm process. It sports 53.9 billion transistors on a 356.5 square mm die. This makes it comparable to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5080, which features a 378 square mm die size and 45.6 billion transistors.

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AMD is also significantly improving the Radeon Media Engine with 20-25% better video quality, more efficient playback, and more advanced encoder and decoder hardware. For content creators, RDNA 4 is a big step up over RDNA 3, with AMD ensuring that these improvements will immediately be felt when firing up the popular streaming and capture app OBS. The new AMD Radiance Display Engine includes DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1b support for up to 4K 12-bit HDR at 480Hz and up to 8K 12-bit HDR at 165Hz.

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We'll dive into RDNA 4's architecture in more detail at launch, so stay tuned.