Today AMD unveiled it’s latest RDNA-3-powerered graphics cards, including the Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, but they also provided some updates on their partnerships with publishers. The big revelation is that AMD and Ubisoft have partnered to optimize the new version of the Snowdrop engine, which will power Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Massive Entertainment’s Star Wars project, and the Splinter Cell remake, amongst other titles.
AMD showed off a brief Snowdrop Engine tech demo (you can check it out for yourself at this timestamp) featuring ray-traced global illumination, shadows, and more. Thankfully, a “highly optimized” implementation of AMD ray tracing allows for impressive performance despite the visual bells and whistles. At 4K with high-performance ray tracing enabled, the demo runs at over 80fps with the help of FSR. It’s not entirely clear how the performance of this Snowdrop Engine demo will translate to an actual game like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but AMD GPU owners excited about Ubisoft’s future slate probably have nothing to worry about.
AMD also took some time to briefly touch on a couple of already-announced partnerships with The Callisto Protocol and Forspoken. On The Callisto Protocol, AMD promises ray tracing is going to be used to “full effect” with shadows, translucency, and glossy refractions at play to maximize that creepy horror atmosphere. At “4K and higher” resolutions, AMD promises RX 7900 cards will deliver “incredible framerates”. Meanwhile, Forspoken offers ray traced lighting and shadows, and will make full use of FSR and VRR allowing it to run “incredibly fast.”
If you’d like to catch up on everything AMD announced today, here’s the lowdown the Radeon RX 7900 XT and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. In addition to that, AMD also announced FSR 3, which they promise will deliver double the performance boost of FSR 2 thanks to new fluid frame technology.
