The success of the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards is entirely due to the new RDNA 2 architecture.

Take a look at what’s new in the AMD RDNA 2 architecture!

 

AMD RDNA 2 Architecture : Tech Highlights!

The AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards are built on the new AMD RDNA 2 architecture, which features an enhanced Compute Unit, a new visual pipeline with Ray Accelerators, and the new AMD Infinity Cache.

AMD Infinity Cache

The AMD Infinity Cache is a new and very large 128 MB data cache. Think of it as an L3 cache for the GPU.

AMD added it to dramatically increase memory bandwidth, which reducing memory latency and power consumption.

They claim it delivers up to 3.25X the bandwidth of the 256-bit GDDR6 memory, and up to 2.4X more effective bandwidth per watt.

Recommended :AMD Infinity Cache Explained : L3 Cache Comes To The GPU!

New Ray Accelerator

RDNA 2 introduces a new Ray Accelerator – one for each Compute Unit.

The Ray Accelerator is a fixed-function ray tracing acceleration engine to deliver real-time lighting, shadow and reflection realism through DirectX Raytracing (DXR).

It will calculate the intersections of the rays with the scene geometry as represented in a Bounding Volume Hierarchy, sort them, and return the information to the shaders for further scene traversal or result shading.

Each Ray Accelerator can calculate up to 4 rays per box intersections or 1 ray per triangle intersection per clock cycle.

Variable Rate Shading

Variable rate shading allows the GPU to better use its limited processing capability by focusing on the most important parts of the frame.

AMD RDNA 2 has variable rate shading built throughout the entire pixel pipeline, with 1 x 1, 2 x 1, 1 x 2 and 2x 2 shading rates.

RDNA 2 also allows for very fine granularity – a different shading rate can to be selected for every 8 x 8 pixels region.

Hardware Decoding + Encoding

RDNA. 2 also introduces support for hardware 8K and AV1 decoding, allowing you to stream and watch video with virtually no performance impact.

Codecs	Decode	Encode
VP9	4K @ 90 fps 8K @ 24 fps	–
H.264	1080p @ 600 fps 4K @ 150 fps	1080p @ 360 fps 4K @ 90 fps
H.265	1080p @ 360 fps 4K @ 90 fps 8K @ 24 fps	1080p @ 360 fps 4K @ 60 fps
AV1	8K @ 30 fps	–