Amd rdna2 improves rdna's energy efficiency by 50%

AMD Radeon lovers are in luck because RDNA 2 is so much better than RDNA. Considering that only a year has passed, this manufacturer has worked hard to be able to compete again against Nvidia in 2020. The brand took advantage of the Financial Analyst Day to present this novelty, which we will tell you below.

AMD RDNA2: Ray-Tracing, Energy Efficiency and VRS

For starters, RDNA2 is going to offer energy efficiency that is 50% better than RDNA. This new architecture is expected to rise to 7nm +, which would offer an increase in transistor density by 17% over 7nm. This would help AMD improve the price-performance ratio, such as increasing the frequency of its GPUs.

However, AMD has two more keys to being able to compete with Nvidia: Ray-Tracing in real time and a variable rate of adaptive shading or shading (VRS). Both have been standardized by Microsoft under DirectX 12 DXR and VRS APIs. So AMD announced yesterday that RDNA2 will come with dedicated Ray-Tracing hardware.

Mention that this RDNA2 architecture is going to be used by the next generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft, so AMD could take advantage to standardize Ray-Tracing. As for the variable shading rate, it would allow graphics applications to set different shadow details to different places in the 3D scene.

AMD hopes to extend RDNA to any desktop client, professional graphics for creators, laptops, and the latest cloud graphics. Its biggest supporters are going to be the PlayStation and XBOX consoles .

In closing, AMD mentioned the next generation of the RDNA3 graphics architecture above, but without revealing details. We only know that it will have a manufacturing process more advanced than 7nm EUV (possibly 5nm) and that it will come between 2021 and 2022. AMD will boost its graphics with RDNA2 until the next 6 four-month periods.

RDNA and CDNA, separation of professional and gaming range

Another of AMD's plans is to separate professional cards and gaming cards. Gaming GPUs will use RDNA, while professionals will take advantage of CDNA. The latter architecture will support AMD's Infinity Interconnect. It is an improved version of the Infinity Fabric bus, which is used to resolve the consistency of heterogeneous data.

In this sense, the first generation of this professional range would be Radeon Pro Vega, based on a CNG architecture and with a 7nm node. CDNA2 will use Infinity Fabric 3.0, its node will be upgraded to 5nm and will be released before 2022. The graphics card is tentatively called the Radeon Instinct Mi150, which could equip the "El Capitan" supercomputer.