Unlike Nvidia, AMD Wants ‘AI Acceleration’ For NPC Behavior, Movement And More

Head of AMD Radeon Technology and Senior Executive David Wang recently interviewed with 4Gamer. During the interview, David Wang discussed many things, including the future of AMD and the strategy for the next generation of Radeon cards based on RDNA4.

David Wang started by discussing Mesh Shaders; the current Radeon RDNA3 architecture features MDIA, also known as Multi Draw Indirect Accelerator. RDNA3 can also process MDI at a hardware level, which is why AMD succeeded in achieving 2.3x performance compared to RDNA2.

David also states that the company sees MDIA as a direct replacement for the current LoD Level of Detail system and plans to implement better and more advanced shaders and techniques in the future for RDNA4.

David Wang also has an entirely different approach to how AI acceleration should be used on AMD Radeon cards. According to David, the decision to include an AI accelerator on RDNA3 was more of a business decision based on what users want or don’t want.

AMD is also not planning to limit the use of AI accelerator on the RDNA3 architecture to just upscaling methods like DLSS, Xess, or FSR. It’s looking to use AI acceleration to improve other things within graphics cards, like better NPC Behavior and Movement or image processing.

Developers can use the RDNA3 AI accelerator to provide users with a much better gaming experience. David also states,

“The reason NVIDIA is actively trying to use AI technology even for applications that can be done without AI technology is that NVIDIA has installed a large-scale inference accelerator in the GPU.

To make effective use of it, it seems they are working on a theme that needs to mobilize many inference accelerators.

That’s their GPU strategy, which is excellent, but I don’t think we should have the same strategy.

We are focused on including the specs that users want and need to give them enjoyment in consumer GPUs. Otherwise, users are paying for features they never use. We believe that inference accelerators should be implemented in gamers’ GPUs to make games more advanced and fun”.    

As a closing note, the AMD representatives promised us a more robust architecture next year that will perform much better than what RDNA3 has to offer. What are your thoughts on what AMD RDNA4 provides, and what do you expect?

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