AMD latest beta driver dramatically improves Alan Wake 2 ray tracing performance

[Daniel Sims]

In context: Alan Wake 2's use of path tracing is arguably its leading technological achievement, but so far, the feature has only attained playable framerates on Nvidia graphics cards. AMD's next major driver update, currently available in beta, takes a significant step toward closing the ray tracing performance gap between the two GPU vendors.

New benchmarks from German outlet PC Games Hardware indicate that AMD's latest preview drivers can increase Alan Wake 2's ray tracing performance by up to 35 percent. It's unclear if other titles with heavy ray tracing implementations see a similar benefit.

Alan Wake 2 hasn't received any significant patches since early December, around the same time AMD released its current stable Radeon drivers, so the framerate increase comes entirely from the 23.40.01.10 preview driver. At 1080p with maximum graphics settings and FSR 2 quality mode engaged, Team Red's flagship 7900 XTX manages an average of 58.3fps. It still lags far behind the 75.4fps of its supposed competitor – the GeForce RTX 4080 – but the new drivers give the 7900 XTX a 35 percent lift over its performance from last month.

From there, the gains with lower-tier GPUs or at higher resolutions are smaller but still meaningful. For example, the 7800 XT receives a 22 percent boost at 1080p and an 11 percent improvement at 4K. Moreover, Alan Wake 2 features multiple RT presets, so turning down some settings could bring a stable 60fps experience within reach.

Image credit: PC Games Hardware

Since the framerate increase comes entirely from the driver update, other games that substantially employ ray tracing, like Cyberpunk 2077, might deserve another look. TechSpot's analysis of the Phantom Liberty expansion from September shows the 7900 XTX falling well behind the 4080. Outside of Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk, path tracing is still mainly seen in updates for retro games like Portal RTX, Quake II RTX, and Sultim Tsyrendashiev's mods for numerous classics.

AMD's upcoming driver is set for a January 24 stable release. It will introduce Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), an alternative version of FSR 3 that, while less effective, enables users to implement frame generation on most games at the driver level. Although Alan Wake 2 doesn't support FSR 3, AFMF could improve the game's presentation further.

Aside from ray tracing, Alan Wake 2 is infamous for its high minimum system requirements. Aging GPU generations like GTX 10 and Radeon RX 5000 struggle to run Alan Wake 2 despite being perfectly serviceable for many recent games because they lack mesh shader support. An unofficial Vulkan conversion can improve the situation but can't perform miracles.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/101540-amd-latest-beta-driver-dramatically-improves-alan-wake.html

 

[vvtunes]

Fine wine indeed

 

[winjer]

It's great that AMD keeps improving RT performance in their drivers.
But their main bottleneck is still the hardware. They really need to have dedicated RT units, like NVidia and Intel.
Hopefully RDNA4 is just that, so we can have some proper competition between nvidia, AMD and Intel. And with that, maybe lower prices for GPUs.

 

[Lounds]

This is good news and just proves that RDNA3 needed more time for the drivers to mature. I assume a lot of optimisations to RDNA2's handling of RT is what's helped RDNA3. Hopefully the gap between Nvidia and AMD at the next generation for RT is much narrower.

 

[AlphaLyrae]

It's great that AMD keeps improving RT performance in their drivers.
But their main bottleneck is still the hardware. They really need to have dedicated RT units, like NVidia and Intel.
Hopefully RDNA4 is just that, so we can have some proper competition between nvidia, AMD and Intel. And with that, maybe lower prices for GPUs.

There are dedicated RT units.

Ray-triangle intersection testing is handled by the dedicated RA unit (1 per CU) and does 1 ray-triangle intersection test per cycle per pixel. Ada Lovelace does 4 intersection tests, so has 4x more testing capacity. You can see this in Cyberpunk 2077's full path tracing mode where 7900XTX performs at the rate of Turing's RTX 2080Ti, as it has equivalent ray-triangle testing rate. This is one area where AMD's solution is lacking performance. Path tracing relies on ray-triangle intersection testing.

Ray-box intersection testing is handled by TMU+raybox units (4 per CU). Even shared with TMUs doing texture work, there can be up to 2.6 ray-box tests per CU per cycle, else it's up to 4 ray-box tests per CU per cycle when no texture work is present.

BVH traversals are the only thing being done solely on CUs as a compute stage, and yes, this could be moved to a wider fixed-function RA unit. Freeing up CU compute can help async compute optical flow in FSR3 FG and can also improve overall game performance if CUs can be tasked with work and aren't just sitting idle. BVH generation is done on CPU.

AMD's solution is die-area efficient and semi-flexible. Fixed function logic is highly rigid, but is extremely fast, since logic must be within the defined parameters.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

It's great that AMD keeps improving RT performance in their drivers.
But their main bottleneck is still the hardware. They really need to have dedicated RT units, like NVidia and Intel.
Hopefully RDNA4 is just that, so we can have some proper competition between nvidia, AMD and Intel. And with that, maybe lower prices for GPUs.

fwiw the few leaks we have of RDNA4 say RT will be improved quite a bit, but given it's N48 that's coming I still would not expect Nvidia beating RT performance. If it could match 4070 it would be doing ok. Raster though is said to be very good; 7900 levels from a 8700 class gpu.

Hopefully though RDNA5 get's dedicated RT hardware. AMD released an interesting patent recently will talks about accelerated intersection analysis. BVH IIRC, which alludes to dedicated hardware incoming.