AMD "Navi 24" is the Smallest RDNA2 GPU Yet, Could Power RX 6400 Series

[Valantar]

It looks like Rembrandt will have 12CUs of RDNA2 (at most) according to rumours this week.

If you look at the raytracing performance of the 6800XT with 72CUs, and then assume that clocks will be closer to half the speed on the APU's RDNA2 CUs, you could be looking at 1/12th the performance and that's probably not enough to make an image, the lack of samples will be so noisy that no amount of magic DLSS equivalent or noise reduction is going to make a good image out of it.

Hey, I hope I'm wrong. Cheaper, better-looking graphics are great for everyone but raytracing tech is still very much a brute-force method of rendering and heavily cut down parts don't tick the box for brute-force tools.

At that point they'll probably leave those parts of the silicon dark to lower the thermal density of the chip.

rDNA2's raytracing is not seperate hardware, it's done with their GPGPU cores. rDNA without raytracing would be rDNA1.

There is bespoke hardware, but it's integrated into the cores (BVH calculations and so on). Without bespoke hardware they couldn't run the necessary calculations at a sufficient performance level.

 

[Chrispy_]

At that point they'll probably leave those parts of the silicon dark to lower the thermal density of the chip.

Yeah, that - or perhaps they'll find some other non-raytracing use for them in their fidelityFX suite, since the raytracing stuff in RDNA2 is apparently leveraging their GPGPU functionality.