At IFA 2024 held in Berlin, Germany last year, Jack Huynh, AMD's senior vice president and general manager of the computing and graphics division, confirmed that in the future, the consumer-oriented RDNA and data center-oriented CDNA architecture will be unified into the UDNA architecture. AMD simplifies the architecture so that developers only need to focus on one system to better cope with Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem.
According to Wccftech, AMD seems to have a big plan for the next generation UDNA architecture. It has applied for a series of patents in the past two years, focusing on performance and functional improvements in ray tracing. Unlike Nvidia, AMD not only targets the PC market, but also needs to consider the needs of Sony PlayStation game consoles to bring more stable output to game frame rates without placing too much emphasis on hardware capabilities.
Among the patents applied for by AMD, one of the most eye-catching information is the BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) management method. The specific method is to find the BVH similarities between graphic objects in the scene and then compress them to reduce usage and CPU overhead. In addition, AMD also plans to introduce accelerated ray traversal and intersection detection technology to detect which graphics objects are rendered to further improve ray tracing efficiency. Some analysts pointed out that AMD may achieve ray tracing performance comparable to Nvidia's Blackwell architecture on its new generation UDNA architecture.
Additionally, in Sony's project, AMD plans to develop advanced path tracing solutions that may utilize neural rendering technology.