I agree, it would be a mistake not doubling the unit count per WEU.
Raytracing is moving away from being a gimmic and working itself into core features of game-engines, like replacing rasterized lightning entirely (in Metro series) or speeding up more advanced lightning techniques (UE5 Lumen). Every profile title seems to have more and more of it.
And yes, in games you can buy
today, raytracing is largely still a gimmic, but let's not forget how long the lifecycle of GPUs . Let's say someone wants to by "the best AMD has to offer" in September 2024. Even then, the only option would still be a N31 variant (probably a mid-cycle refresh), and that person almost certainly would want at least 2-3 years out of that purchase. Just adding 20% more Ray Accelerators (even when slightly tuned) would not be enough for that timeline. AMD already sorta is the laggard in the group (as even Intel has
2 ray traversal pipelines per Xe-core with can each do more).
What I would want for AMD to do is:
- Double the Ray Accelerator count per WEU
- Improve the units themselves. AMD's RT units currently do 4 Ray/Box and 1 Ray/Triangle intersections, while Intel does 12 and 1 (with 2x the "RT units" per "core"). As there is more and more geometry in games, I'd at least like to see the Ray/Triangle rate double to 2 per clock in at least most instances (Ray/Box rate IMO is less of an issue, but could also be increased slightly)
- Add some fixed-function hardware to speed up BVH traversal, like the competitors have (freeing up some CU resources)
I really hope we at least get point 1 or 2. Both would already be very good, with 3 as a bonus (but quite unlikely considering the die-sizes)