Microsoft says Xbox Series X|S are the only consoles with full AMD RDNA 2 support

Today Microsoft announced on its news site dedicated to Xbox, Xbox Wire, that its next-generation consoles are the only consoles on the market with full support for AMD’s new RDNA 2 architecture. In a post titled “A Closer Look at How Xbox Series X|S Integrates Full AMD RDNA 2 Architecture”, it detailed:

“AMD’s latest RDNA 2 architecture offers a significant boost in performance and efficiency over previous architectures, in addition to adding new hardware acceleration features, including hardware-accelerated DirectX Raytracing, Mesh Shaders, Sampler Feedback and Variable Rate Shading. Hardware-accelerated DirectX Raytracing, showcased at launch by titles like Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs: Legion, lets developers deliver a new level of visual fidelity and immersion through techniques like realistic lighting, shadows, reflections and acoustics. Mesh Shaders can manipulate geometry in real time to provide a level of fidelity and flexibility developers have never had before. Sampler Feedback greatly improves memory efficiency by letting games load into memory, with fine granularity, only the portions of textures the GPU needs for a scene, as it needs them, providing an effective 2.5x memory and bandwidth multiplier beyond the raw hardware capabilities. Sampler Feedback also enables efficient creation and shading of textures on demand.

Finally, Variable Rate Shading (VRS) offers much finer-grained control over how developers can harness the full power of Xbox Series X|S, letting developers focus their GPU resources on the areas of a frame that benefit most without reducing overall image quality. By leveraging techniques like VRS, games like Gears 5 can see performance gains of up to 15% and beyond, resulting in higher, more consistent frame rates and resolution with the same image quality. All of these next-gen features are available via hardware on both the Xbox Series X and the Series S, and we’re excited for them to come to PC as well, providing a common set of features developers can rely on when building their games across console and PC.”

What does this mean in practice? That both Sony and Microsoft took the set of technologies present in the RDNA 2 architecture and adopted or dropped their use in their GPUs, that is, Microsoft will use everything the technology offers, while Sony dropped certain technologies in favor of its own equivalent technologies or solutions, such as Geometry Shaders, which compete with Microsoft’s Mesh Shaders.

Source: Xbox Wire