What’s going on here? Suddenly, AMD shows off a little tech brawn, and the rest of us get to sit around dumbfounded. Wait, what? Path tracing? On AMD hardware? Yep, that’s a fact. Some mad genius out there threw down the gauntlet, making far-away wild results that could make even the most hardcore Nvidia fanboy do a double-take.
The original tweet that started this whole whirlwind storm shows everything being played out at 4K with FSR 4 Performance Mode injected and frame-gen turned up to 11. And honestly? It looks stupid good. Like, “why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-sooner” good. The other video clip (we really cannot host it here, but trust us, actually go look it up) has the kind of buttery smoothness that you usually associate with those fancy DLSS 3 setups, but nah, not here. AMD’s in this game, and they are playing for keeps.
For the unaware, path tracing is kind of like ray tracing on steroids. The very essence of path tracing is that it traces every ray of light from the scene-and thus has become somewhat of a unicorn for every non-RTX 4090 GPU-around the way, AMD hardware just crunched through it like it was nothing. With FSR 4 giving it a lot of help and frame-gen smoothing it out, this could be a real win for budget builds and mid-range rigs.
Now, before selling a few kidneys for AMD upgrades, let’s slow down. This kind of wizardry isn’t official yet. A mod, more or less-whatever amazing genius hacked his own version of the act. But the very fact that it can be done? That’s the good part. Should AMD be smart (and they would really be stupid if they did not), we could see this being baked into upcoming drivers or, hell, even RDNA 4.
The most wicked thing is that performance mode FSR 4 seems to be really holding its own. Traditionally, throwing some upscale at a game in performance settings at 4K simply denudes it into a pixelated mess; but this? Make it clean and fluid, no ghosting, no artifacts, just pure, sweet glory of path tracing. And frame-gen? Buttery smooth, no stutter. Just one of those demos that makes you forget about any benchmarks and look dumbfounded at your screen with a “what the hell” expression.
Of course, these give rise to the totally predictable flood of questions. Latency? Will it work with real games, outside any controlled tests? If AMD ever will support this wizardry is the most important question on everyone’s minds. To nobody’s knowledge; happily, this is sufficient to build a solid hype train on.
So, yes. AMD might just have flipped the script for higher graphics. Nvidia is still the crown jewel, of course, but if this together trickle of modded goodness does become a flood? Interesting times. So much has to happen in days ahead; we are convinced this is the beginning of something epic.
And if you happen to be on an AMD card right now? Maybe think twice about selling it. It’s looking really bright (and way more path-traced) for the future than anyone had figured.
