The latest rumors from Chiphell have a lot to say about AMD’s RDNA 4 flagship, the Radeon RX 8800 XT. There are details about every aspect of the GPU, but their validity remains in question. The report suggests raster gaming performance comparable to the GeForce RTX 4080, a claim we’ve covered in the past. This would imply a generation uplift of 30% over the Radeon RX 7800 XT which in turn was a mere 5-6% faster than the 6800 XT.
AMD Radeon RX 8800 XT: Ray Tracing Performance
Ray Tracing performance will allegedly increase by 45% which is only possible if this is a Navi 48 part. Games like Resident Evil 4 will see the greatest gains, beating the Radeon RX 7900 XTX by 40-45% when ray-tracing is enabled. This is a lofty claim, and wouldn’t put much stock in it till we see something more concrete.
The Radeon RX 8800 XT should feature the same ray-tracing engine as the Sony PS5 Pro. The PS5 Pro GPU leverages BVH8 traversal shaders (ray tracing accelerators), a 2x upgrade from the BVH4 implementation used by RDNA 3 and 2.
Here’s the difference between BVH4 and BVH8 shaders: AMD’s ray-tracing pipeline includes the texture units that are used for ray-box/ray-triangle intersection tests.
In RDNA 2 and 3, each box node running on a texture unit can handle 4 ray-box intersections (or 4 ray-triangle intersections) per cycle. RDNA 3 uses certain instructions to improve it, but this is the base figure. RDNA 4 leverages compute units capable of BVH8 (8 ray-box intersections per cycle), twice as much as the PS5 and Radeon RX 7000 GPUs.
The other primary drawback of the RDNA 3 architecture was its high power consumption. The Radeon TX 8800 XT will draw 25% less power than the RX 7900 XTX, topping out at 260W. That is about as much as the RX 7800 XT, so unless the abovementioned gains materialize, it’ll be hard to justify.
The Radeon RX 8800 XT is expected to enter mass production later this month. The reporter claims that there are still some bugs related to power delivery, but they should be ironed out by the year’s end.
