AMD Unveils Radiance Core: Dedicated Ray Tracing Hardware for Faster Path Tracing

AMD has announced a new dedicated hardware block called the Radiance Core for its next-gen Radeon GPUs, developed with Sony. This core is designed to handle ray traversal calculations directly in hardware, offloading the CPU and GPU shader cores, which improves efficiency and lighting performance in games. AMD aims to close the current performance gap in path tracing compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. The Radiance Core promises a significant speed boost by specializing in unified light transport and freeing up hardware resources for shading and lighting. Additional enhancements like efficient data structures for geometry are planned. While this tech isn’t expected on PCs soon, it marks a major step forward for AMD’s ray tracing capabilities and overall GPU performance.