This post contains *reporting on* and analysis of AMD’s *ray tracing patents, which were obtained by checking all their* patent applications and...
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The original was posted on /r/hardware by /u/MrMPFR on 2025-04-21 13:51:35+00:00.

This post contains reporting on and analysis of AMD’s ray tracing patents, which were obtained by checking all their patent applications and grants from Jan 2023 and up to April 19th, 2025.

Text before patent descriptions have been rewritten and improved.

Disclaimer: Need to preface this with saying that I’m not a software engineer, electronics engineer, or an expert in real-time ray traced rendering or anything else computer related. Just a realtime ray traced rendering and PC hardware enthusiast with too much spare time on hand ATM. But I’ll make to distinguish between reporting on the patents, analysis and also I’ve avoided analysis completely when in doubt and will make that crystal clear. if you despite those precautions still want the most accurate analysis I recommend waiting until Chips and Cheese has covered the patents provided herein and alternatively you’ll probably need to read the patents yourself.

Regarding the RDNA 4 patents, I might have overlooked some of the oldest patent filings.

TL;DR: AMD looks to be building a strong path for themselves with all these patent filings about potential future technologies. If all or the vast majority of them get implemented then worst case AMD would achieve ray tracing (RT) hardware feature set and perhaps even RT performance parity with NVIDIA. Best case AMD would be significantly ahead of NVIDIA Blackwell all regards related to hardware and their driver agnostic API (DXR for example) implementations (independent of devs and games). They could even have a viable competitor to NVIDIA’s RTX Mega Geometry and a ReSTIR path tracer. End of TL:DR

A RT glossary is provided here if you’re not familiarized with some of the concepts introduced in the patents and how ray tracing works. You can skip from here if you just want to read the patent descriptions.

It’s very reassuring to see AMD take ray tracing this seriously and for this long and like u/wizfactor said (check comment section) based on average patent implementation timelines of 3-4 years it’s not completely unreasonable to think most of this tech could make it into the nextgen consoles and/or AMD’s next GPU generation. But then again remember that complacency is not an option when competing against NVIDIA, especially not with their current situation, which almost certainly isn’t going to last into the future generations. The iterative RTX 50 series and it’s incredibly poor the RT and path tracing (PT) uplift over 40 series hasn’t brought them any closer to Jensen’s vision from Turing’s 2018 launch of making transformative RT available for every gamer. But when the time is right, surely NVIDIA will go full steam ahead and heavily priotize RT hardware and software advancements thus completely destroying Blackwell in RT and PT with either a significantly revamped or even clean slate architecture.

Both companies are no doubt breathing down each others neck, anticipating each others next move, and trying to leapfrog each other in RT hardware and software. Now that RT has finally entering a state of maturity in game development, we can probably expect significant progress from both companies in the future as RT exists the PCMR niche and enters the mainstream by being built around the consoles.

With Turing NVIDIA threw the gauntlet and a lot indicates that AMD might finally have picked it up with their upcoming GPU generation and is now gearing up for a RT arms race with NVIDIA. Exciting times ahead indeed.

Also many thanks to u/BeeBeepBoopBeepBoop for alerting me to the patent filings shared in the Anandtech Forums by DisEnchantment prompting me to do a more thorough search. I was frustrated by the tech media’s lackluster coverage and took it upon myself to report on the progress.

u/BeeBeepBoopBeepBoop also told me that AMD has been poaching RT talent for years: “a linkedin search shows AMD hired a lot of former Intel (and Imagination) RTRT people, a lot from the Software/Academic side of RTRT post 2022-2023, so realistically we will starting seeing their contributions from RDNA5/UDNA onwards.“

This indicates AMD significantly increased their commentment sometime leading up to and during the RDNA 3 product cycle. At least that’s when the most interesting patents began to be filed. Research and getting it ready for a patent filing takes many months or even years and the public release of patent filings happens ~1.5-2 years post filing date, so I doubt we’ve seen much yet. Probably not even a significant portion of their current patent filings in the publicly available patent grants and applications not to mention all the ongoing and future R&D. So I would probably expect a ton more interesting ray tracing patent filings to pop up during the RDNA 4 product cycle and leading up to the release of the nextgen consoles. Someone should definitely keep and eye on this moving forward.

I must admit that mining for parsing through this many patents and trying to grasp the esoteric patent information is incredibly boring but it gives a unique glimpse into the future of technology, which is often hidden in plain sight. As an example just look at the included RDNA 4 patent filings that were made public between June 23rd, 2022 - December 21, 2023 and even got grant status between October 10, 2023 - January 7th, 2025. I was surprised about how far this was ahead of the launch in in March.

Patent Applications

Patent applications for Advanced Micro Devices, Inc or AMD can be found here.

Search performed on the April 19th, 2025 going back through all of 2023-2024 through Justia’s database specifically for AMD’s RT related patents, whether that being software or hardware. I’ve skipped anything auxiliary about data management and scheduling that doesn’t directly mention RT. These patents could be just as important, but I’m ignoring them in this post.

ACCELERATION STRUCTURES WITH DELTA INSTANCES

  • Filing date: September 28, 2021
  • Publication date: March 30, 2023
  • Grant date:
  • Link:

Description: BVHs including delta instances, that’s instances with modifications to the base mesh, such as slight alterations of the geometry, material properties and other attributes. The goal here is compression of delta non-leaf nodes by storing shared identical data as one dataset instead of duplicatingit across all the instances. This can likely be applied to animated geometry and looks like a step closer towards a RTX Mega Geometry competitor similar to many of the other BVH patents.

METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PERFORMING HIGH SPEED PARALLEL LOCALLY ORDER CLUSTERING FOR A BOUNDING VOLUME HIERARCHY

  • Filing date: September 30, 2022
  • Publication date: November 2, 2023
  • Grant date:
  • Link:

Description: A PLOC algorithm. IDK if this is related to PLOC++ or H-PLOC (most likely the latter) but this is part of AMD’s work towards getting a viable high speed and high quality BVH builder that can work with non-static geometry.

BOUNDING VOLUME HIERARCHY LEAF NODE COMPRESSION

  • Filing date: December 14, 2022
  • Publication date: June 20, 2024
  • Grant date:
  • Link:

Description: Might be leveraging the dense geometry format (DGF) to compress the underlying geometry and making it compatible with ray tracing through leaf node (BLAS) compression.

INTERSECTABLE INSTANCE NODES FOR RAY TRACING ACCELERATION STRUCTURE NODES

  • Filing date: December 14, 2022
  • Publication date: June 20, 2024
  • Grant date:
  • Link:

Description: Ray instance node transformation and a two phase ray traversal by first transforming the instance node and then performing ray-box intersection testing based on the transformed ray. This patent is confusing and IDK what the implications are. Sounds like could result in improved efficiency, enhanced accuracy and optimized resource usage and possibly even enhanced scalability, which could enable more intricate and large BVHs, but all this is a wild guess so don’t take it too seriously.

BOX SPLITTING FOR BOUNDING VOLUME HIERARCHIES

  • Filing date: December 14, 2022
  • Publication date: June 20, 2024
  • Grant date:
  • Link:

Description: Reassigning child nodes for other bounding boxes at runtime (shuffling them around). I have no idea how this impacts RT and baselessly assume it must make it faster.

TRAVERSING MULTIPLE REGIONS OF A BOUNDING VOLUME HIERARCHY IN PARALLEL

  • Filing date: December 27, 2022
  • Publication date: June 27, 2024
  • Grant date:
  • Link:

Description: Taps into execution items by allowing them to be dynamically reassigned to another ray after traversal completes speeding up RT by reducing idle time and improving resource utilization.

VARIABLE RATE BVH TRAVERSAL

  • Filing date: February 21, 2023
  • Publ…

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