When AMD moved on from its GCN microarchitecture back in 2019, the company decided to split its new graphics microarchitecture into two different designs, with RDNA designed to power gaming graphics products for the consumer market while the CDNA architecture was designed specifically to cater to compute-centric AI and HPC workloads in the data center.
I wonder if CDNA will be more akin to Tensor Cores on RTX GPUs, leading to better ray tracing performance of gaming.
Tensor cores have nothing to do with raytracing. They’re cut-down GPU cores specialising in tensor operations (hence the name) and nothing else. Raytracing is accelerated by RT cores, doing BVH traversal operations and ray intersections, the tensor cores are in there to run a denoiser to turn the noisy mess that real-time RT produces into something that’s, well, not messy. Upscaling, essentially, the only difference between denoising and upscaling is that in upscaling the noise is all square.
And judging by how AMD has done this stuff before nope they won’t do separate cores, but make sure that the ordinary cores can do all that stuff well.
I wonder if CDNA will be more akin to Tensor Cores on RTX GPUs, leading to better ray tracing performance of gaming.
Tensor cores have nothing to do with raytracing. They’re cut-down GPU cores specialising in tensor operations (hence the name) and nothing else. Raytracing is accelerated by RT cores, doing BVH traversal operations and ray intersections, the tensor cores are in there to run a denoiser to turn the noisy mess that real-time RT produces into something that’s, well, not messy. Upscaling, essentially, the only difference between denoising and upscaling is that in upscaling the noise is all square.
And judging by how AMD has done this stuff before nope they won’t do separate cores, but make sure that the ordinary cores can do all that stuff well.
Oh I see. So DLSS and especially ray reconstruction uses tensor core, would that be right?
I guess then it may be better to keep expectations low.
Yep that’s what nvidia marketing seems to be calling their denoiser nowadays. Gods spare us marketing departments.