Up to 40% ray tracing boost for last-gen cards in AMD’s new driver

But so far, that only applies to synthetic tests.

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We reported onAMD’s latest graphics driver dumpyesterday. AMD detailed a pretty exhaustive list of benefits and performance improvements with Adrenalin Edition Driver 23.2.1. Conspicuously missing were any claims of huge ray-tracing performance boosts of up to 40%.

Reportedly, however, that’s exactly what some owners of AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs are experiencing. But there’s a catch. Thus far, it seems the really big boosts in performance relate to synthetic tests of ray-tracing performance.

By way of example, one Twitter user claimed a performance uplift from 27.84 fps to 38.17 fps in 3DMark’s DirectX Ray tracing feature set benchmark running on an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. Another poster saw performance in the same benchmark increase from 31.51 fps to 42.58 fps on an RX 6900 XT.

Real-world results in actual games, however, appear to be generally more modest for now. Some RX 6000 owners have claimed small uplifts in Doom Eternal with ray-tracing enabled. But benchmarks of CyberPunk 2077 with ray-tracing on have shown no change at all.

Broadly, it doesn’t make sense to expect results from synthetic tests of ray-tracing performance to translate into real-world gaming frame rates for several reasons. For starters, the code used in any given test may or may not reflect that used by actual game engines.

But perhaps even more significant, ray-tracing only makes up a small proportion of the rendering pipeline for any current game. There’s much more going on and a 40% boost in one pipeline element isn’t going to automatically translate into an overall 40% boost in frame rate.

Anyway, given AMD’s current shortfall in ray-tracing performance, not only with the older RX 6000 series but also the latest RX 7000 boards versus Nvidia’sRTX 30andRTX 40series graphics, every little helps. That said, for now it is unclear whether the new RX 7000 GPUs, including theRadeon RX 7900 XT and XTXare even getting the same synthetic uplift. Watch this space.

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For the record, below is the list of official benefits from the Adrenalin Edition Driver 23.2.1 release, and you can read more from theoriginal AMD source here.

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Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

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