AMD's next-gen UDNA 5 GPUs: patent filings tease huge ray tracing perf upgrades to fight NVIDIA

AMD plans some big performance upgrades with its next-gen UDNA 5 GPU, with PC gamers benefitting from AMD's close collaboration with Sony on PlayStation 6.

AMD's next-gen UDNA 5 GPUs: patent filings tease huge ray tracing perf upgrades to fight NVIDIA
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TL;DR: AMD’s upcoming UDNA GPU architecture, potentially named UDNA 5, promises significant ray tracing performance improvements targeting both PC gaming and Sony’s next-generation PlayStation 6 console. Leveraging advanced BVH compression and turbocharged ray traversal, AMD aims to rival NVIDIA’s RTX 50 series in real-time ray tracing efficiency.

AMD's next-generation GPU architecture after RDNA 4 is pointing towards UDNA, or maybe even dubbed UDNA 5 in new leaks, and will bring huge RT performance gains, and more -- and it's not all for PC gamers, but Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 console plays a huge part in AMD's future with UDNA GPUs.

AMD's next-gen UDNA 5 GPUs: patent filings tease huge ray tracing perf upgrades to fight NVIDIA 44
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In a new post on Reddit by @MrMPFR, who has summarized AMD's plants on RT-focused improvements by reading over patent filings from the company from the last two years. AMD's huge focus on RT (ray tracing) improvements aren't just for PC gamers, but Sony's family of PlayStation consoles, and more especially, the next-generation PS6.

The Redditor says that AMD's focus on ray tracing with UDNA 5 could see them ready performance parity in RT gaming with NVIDIA's current-gen GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" GPUs and calls it a "Maxwell moment" for AMD. One of the pieces of the puzzle put together from the patent filings is AMD's approach to BVH (Bounding VolumeHhierarchy) management, which firstly uses the 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, as well as mentions of turbocharged ray traversal and intersections, referring to the detection of which graphical objects are to be rendered.

The read is absolutely jam-packed with detail, a super-thorough read on what AMD has in the RT pipelines for UDNA 5, and what we should expect in the PlayStation 6 console, which will probably arrive not long after Grand Theft Auto 6 at this point. I do wonder what graphical and game-world leap we'll see in GTA 6, and how that will perform and play out on a next-gen PlayStation 6 console with heavily beefed-up GPU performance and new levels of RT performance.

I for one, would love to see Grand Theft Auto 6 running on a PlayStation 6 at 4K 120FPS... hell, even a tease of 8K 60FPS gaming with GTA 6 would be kliller to see on the PS6. Maybe we'll see 4K 60FPS with RT maxed out in PS6 games, that's hitting about the mainline 4K 60FPS+ on PC gaming (which is already at 4K 120FPS+ and beyond, with 4K 240FPS+ QD-OLED panels on the market now for PC gamers).