red devil

The RDNA2 graphics architecture is built on the philosophy of enormous amounts of compute power to accomplish real-time raytracing. While the most compute-intensive part of ray-tracing, ray intersection, is processed by fixed-function hardware, quite a few aspects, such as denoising, are handled via compute shaders. That’s why AMD doubled the SIMD resources over the previous-generation RDNA, coupled with a new high-clock-speed silicon design. A side-effect of this approach is an enormous performance uplift with traditional raster 3D rendering performance. As it stands, it will still be some time before we have pure raytraced graphics, and both NVIDIA and AMD are stuck with having to combine raster 3D graphics with certain real-time raytraced elements. AMD in its launch event claimed that the RX 6800 XT performs in the same league as NVIDIA’s flagship RTX 3080, and the RX 6800 goes against the RTX 2080 Ti (or RTX 3070), which should mark AMD’s return to the high-end segment on the back of this performance uplift.