When you purchase through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

In a publish on GPUOpena site aimed at games and graphics developers, AMD may have let slip that it plans to take a leaf from Nvidia’s book of rendering tools by including a ray tracing denoising system in its next generation of FSR. And just as importantly, it will use an AI neural network to do it all.

Unless you’re sticking steadfastly to an old graphics card and consciously ignoring every GPU development over the last six years, you’ll know that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have all been furiously busy implementing techniques to improve ray tracing performance and visual quality. .

The latter is greatly affected by the number of rays used to calculate lighting, shadows, reflections, etc. Unfortunately, even on monstrous graphics cards like those from AMD RX 7900 and that of Nvidia RTX4090ray tracing is extremely demanding, so games only use a relatively small number of rays.

This results in a very “noisy” image – grainy looking and often full of white dots – and so games have to do a process called denoising to clean it up. While Cyberpunk 2077, Dark myth: WukongAnd Alan wakes up 2 use their own denoising system, Nvidia has an AI-powered one called Ray reconstruction (RR).

Ray reconstruction involves making ray-traced images much better and more accurate, rather than improving performance, and in Cyberpunk 2077 it’s significantly better than the game’s own denoiser.

But the GPUOpen post makes it clear that Nvidia won’t be the only GPU vendor offering such a feature in the near future. “We are actively researching neural techniques for Monte Carlo denoising with the goal of moving toward real-time path tracing on RDNA GPUs.”

AMD’s RDNA 2, 3, and 3.5 GPUs can all do denoising at the moment, but only those provided by the game in question and shader cores handle all of that. The fact that the research specifically looks at using a neural network to do this means that AMD is very much on board with Nvidia in using AI to improve ray tracing results.

But does this mean that future RDNA GPUs will have dedicated hardware to perform AI calculations? Although Nvidia RTX chips have discrete tensor cores for this task, AMD does not and instead uses specific instructions (called WMMA) and standard shader cores.

This could change in RDNA 4, for two reasons. One is the fact that Sony PlayStation 5 Pro has a dedicated chip to accelerate AI routines for its new PSSR upscaler, and AMD will certainly be aware of the benefits that discrete hardware brings to such tasks. The second is one of the goals listed in AMD’s denoiser research: “Highly optimized performance for real-time path tracing at 4K resolution.”

To me, this alone indicates that AMD has specific hardware to do neural networks, because at 4K, general purpose shader cores simply won’t be enough unless you have a small one mountain. RNDA GPUs are the only ray tracing chips in the desktop market that don’t do it have dedicated tensor/matrix units, so it’s inevitable that AMD will follow suit at some point.

Your next upgrade

Best processor for gaming: The best chips from Intel and AMD.
Best gaming motherboard: The good boards.
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel pusher is waiting for you.
Best SSD for Gaming: Enter the game before the others.

In addition to the fact that AMD has previously stated that it plans to have all its gaming devices use AI for scaling Additionally, I’d say there’s a very good chance that the RDNA 4 chips will have matrix cores that accommodate FSR 4 AI-powered scaling, frame generation, and denoising .

That said, AMD has always believed that its FSR package should work on as many GPUs as possible, not just Radeon cards, but those from Intel and Nvidia as well, provided they have the right level of GPU support. shaders.

If the new technology were exclusive to a generation of RDNA hardware, it could well backfire on AMD, given that its discrete GPU market share is quite small. It’s possible that AMD will offer a two-tier FSR 4 system, like Intel does with XeSS, where the full AI-powered package only runs on RDNA 4 chips, but a slower, less impressive version is available for everyone.

Until we know more, this is of course just speculation, but Radeon fans should take comfort in the fact that AMD is working hard to make its GPUs as modern as possible.