New AMD Radeon GPU is "20%-ish" faster, with 2x ray tracing speed, says leaker

AMD is reportedly working on another big leap in gaming GPU performance with its next-gen AMD Radeon architecture, according to the latest leak. After playing a big game of catch-up with its latest RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT, the company's next generation of graphics cards will apparently make more big strides with ray tracing, an area where AMD has traditionally lagged behind Nvidia, while also significantly improving rendering performance.

As we found in our AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review, the company's current RDNA 4 architecture is now properly competitive with Nvidia's latest offerings, with superb performance across the board, not to mention a decent helping of VRAM. However, there are still some areas where the latest AMD GPUs struggle, such as path tracing, which is an advanced and highly demanding form of ray tracing, and it looks as though the company is focusing on improving its ray tracing performance even further.

This latest bit of GPU gossip comes from regular (and often reliable) tech leaker Kepler_L2 on the Neogaf forums, with follow-up posts on X (formerly Twitter) to clarify a few points. According to the leaker's prediction, the new GPU architecture is "probably 20%-ish for raster perf/CU," which refers to the traditional rendering power of the GPU, without employing new features such as ray tracing and AI upscaling.

That's still a substantial jump, though, especially when the latest Nvidia GPUs gain most of their extra performance in this area from adding extra CUDA cores, rather than improving the performance per core. Meanwhile, Kepler_L2 predicts that the gains in ray tracing in AI performance will be "around 2x," but this doesn't mean double the frame rates in ray-traced games - rather, that the performance of the RT and AI cores has doubled.

As the leaker clarified in a reply on X, "2x RT perf doesn't mean that FPS is doubled, it means that the RT portion of a frametime is halved." In a reply on X, Kepler_L2 also confirmed that these figures are an educated opinion, rather than an exact performance leak.

There are a few other nuggets in the replies and forum posts as well, with Kepler_L2 stating that this new GPU architecture will be used by "both PS6 and Xbox" in the next-gen console releases. Interestingly, it looks as though this new GPU architecture could be called RDNA 5, rather than UDNA. The latter was previously expected to be the new name for AMD's enterprise and gaming GPU architectures, once they were all unified under one roof, but in one reply on X, Kepler_L2 stated that "there is no UDNA," suggesting this is not the case.

The leaker also shared some rumored information about the SoC used for the PlayStation 6 and future Xbox, which is expected to combine an AMD Ryzen CPU and RDNA 5 GPU in one piece of silicon, but Kepler_L2 says there won't be any 3D V-cache used in the CPU portion.
As always with rumors and leaks, take this all with a grain of salt right now, as none of the above has been officially confirmed by AMD.

However, Kepler_L2 has good form on AMD GPU leak stories in the past, including accurately leaking that RDNA 4 GPUs would use last-gen memory, there would be no RDNA 4 high-end GPUs in the lineup, and the new GPUs wouldn't be out until 2025. As such, we're really interested to see how this story evolves, especially if AMD does indeed have a killer new GPU architecture in development.

In the meantime, check out our guide to the best graphics card if you're looking to upgrade now, as well as our guide on how to install a GPU, which takes you through the whole graphics card upgrade process.

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