Amd will implement ray tracing in navi differently from nvidia

An AMD patent may have shown the company's hybrid approach to implementing Ray Tracing on its upcoming Navi GPUs.

AMD will implement a 'hybrid' Ray Tracing solution in its Navi graphics

The patent, titled “ Texture Processor Based Ray Tracing Acceleration Method and System. ” AMD says this approach improves hardware-based solutions only. So it would technically work differently than Nvidia solutions..

AMD will use both existing shader units and "fixed function" hardware to provide users with better performance, while ensuring "flexibility" for developers. According to AMD, his idea could solve the performance and processing issues associated with both hardware and software-based Ray Tracing systems.

Essentially, AMD will introduce what it calls a “fixed function ray intersection engine, ” which is specialized hardware that only handles BVH intersection (the processing of BVH calculations in a sequence processor only. through a software solution it is not a good option, since the divergence in the execution means that a series of error corrections are required, which makes the process requires a lot of time and resources). This fixed-function hardware (which is nothing like NVIDIA's RT cores and is much simpler) is added in parallel to the texture filter pipeline of the GPU's texture processor.

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The full explanation is quite technical in nature, but you can read the full AMD patent for yourself or take a look at the image above for a brief summary.

In short, it seems that AMD is determined to implement Ray Tracing but in a different way, trying to keep the demand for resources not as high as it has been until now.

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