AMD's FSR 4 will be getting its own version of DLSS Ray Reconstruction for Path Tracing

Cyberpunk 2077's impressive RT Overdrive Path Tracing Mode running on a Radeon RX 9070 XT with a playable frame-rate? Yes, it sounds like it's on the cards.

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Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive mode screenshot captured on a GeForce RTX GPU, image credit: Hodi.

Path Tracing or Full Ray Tracing is the future of lighting in games; it takes the promise of ray-tracing and applies the concept of tracing light rays and bounces around a scene to calculate and render realistic shadows, reflections, indirect lighting, global illumination, and more. If a single real-time ray-tracing effect like reflections is hardware intensive, then Path Tracing is like jumping ahead a decade.

Path Tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Alan Wake 2 is like seeing remastered versions of these games from 2030. They're playable on modern hardware only due to AI - specifically DLSS Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Frame Generation. NVIDIA's DLSS-powered Ray Reconstruction is a key reason why these titles look incredible, as the AI-powered denoiser can restore or render noticeably more detail in everything from reflections to texture detail and lighting.

It's like going from HD to 4K, so it's fantastic to learn that AMD's RDNA 4 architecture and FSR 4 have been designed to support Path Tracing. With AMD's new AI-powered Neural Supersampling and Denoising, the company is ensuring that its new RDNA 4 GPUs - the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT - will be ready for Path Tracing.

It doesn't stop there as AMD's Neural Radiance Caching will provide a similar AI-powered approach to NVIDIA's new RTX Neural Shaders by leveraging AI to infer an infinite number of ray bounces in a scene to boost performance. Paired with the new FSR 4 upscaler and AMD's Frame Generation, it will level the playing field with DLSS - so to speak - regarding software support and cutting-edge rendering.

Unfortunately, AMD hasn't confirmed if Neural Supersampling and Denoising will be available as part of FSR 4 on day one or when we might see it up and running in titles, so stay tuned. AMD presented its new Neural Supersampling and Denoising technology as part of a deep dive into RDNA 4's architecture for media using a single rendered frame of a scene that wasn't from a game.