AMD Patents Provide Early UDNA Insights - "Blackwell-esque" Ray Tracing Performance Could be Achievable

[Denver]

This is based on a Reddit post analyzing patents that may or may not relate to UDNA. RT performance depends on several factors, including base rasterization performance. That said, considering the credibility of the source, it’s best to temper expectations for now.

If AMD decides to go all-in on 2nm, don’t expect low prices. However, significant performance gains are likely, especially since they haven’t adopted GDDR7 yet. When they do, future revisions will likely be much faster.

 

[sepheronx]

I am very excited to see what AMD And Intel comes out with next for mid/high end. If I can finally put the RTX 3080 away (sell or whatever), then I will be happy.

 

[ARF]

UDNA is NOT going to be on 2nm dawg.

2nm isn't even in production yet! https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/logic/l_2nm

It better be, because by end of 2026 / beginning of 2027, the 2nm process will be 1-1.5-year-old already.

• TSMC begins production of 2-nm wafers, with orders open from April 1, 2025.
• Large-scale production is expected by the end of 2025, with plants in Hsinchu and Kaohsiung.

TSMC Starts 2nm Wafer Production, Apple Among First Customers

TSMC has begun accepting orders for 2-nanometer wafers, with customers willing to pay around $30,000...

www.turtlesai.com

Given Navi 48's transistor density of over 150 MTr/mm2, it doesn't make sense to use 3nm. It will be a half-node shrink.

In order to improve the ray-tracing performance, they need to put more RT units, or to design a separate chiplet exclusive for RT only.
Also, don't get why they need so slow and expensive "real-time" RT, when all modern games anyways look like shit.


Edit: It would be better to backport UDNA to 5nm and make it double the size of Navi 48 - around the reticle size limit.

 

[Nostras]

Yeah this is a classic I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[phints]

TPU’s review shows the RX 9070 XT has matched RTX 5070/5070Ti ray tracing. What am I missing here it seems AMD has already caught up.

 

[wolf]

Odd that every time Nvidia releases a new generation it's hailed as heavens gift.

What an odd thing to say, as it's been quite the opposite.

Blackwell has been lambasted for lacklustre gains over prior gen, driver issues, missing rops, melting connectors, low VRAM, bad availability, high power consumption and high prices - it's literally being called the worst NVidia launch ever.

Ada was heavily criticised for pricing, the lineup (resulting in un-launching a card) availability, low VRAM, the melting connector on 4090's

All these sentiments are from tech press and the community alike, it doesn't sound like being hailed as heavens gift to me.

There are some products that attract some praise for their performance level in there, but your statement is a serious dose of hyperbole.

As to AMD being a generation behind where the Nvidia products attracted certain praise in their limelight, I don't see what's surprising there. When they launched they had the best performance in X metric. Now times have changed and the bar has been raised, ergo that level of performance just isn't as impressive as it used to be. AMD did a fantastic job disproportionately increasing RT perf with RDNA4, I hope they can do this again with UDNA as it'll go down extremely well with reviewers and users.

 

[Marcus L]

Everyone who is saying AMD need to catch up with NV on features or/ML/Ai etc all they want is the same performance/comparable feature set, so it will force NV to lower their prices and they have no intention of buying AMD even if it was to outperform NV, they just beat around the bush and sugarcoat it like they want more competition, they don't, they want more perf from NV for less $, facts! keep buying the monopoly leader and wishing for more performance for less cost, sure that will work out well for you as it has already, or buy the fucking competition and stop complaining about NV charging a kidney for mediocre products that barely improve gen on gen, and it's only got worse with Shatwell..... ohhhhhhhh we want 32/48GB vram cause we want to use our GPU's for pro workloads but only want to pay consumer prices, Ai is a friggen cancer in the tech industry that thanks to the millions of GPU's companies have bought at extortionate prices isn't going away any time soon as they need to recoup that investment, and it will be us paying for it

 

[Dr. Dro]

Was FSR 4 codeveloped strictly for the PS5 Pro?!

Why would it be? Sony has their own proprietary tech, and... the PS5 is miserably obsolete technology by now. Pro included. Switch 2 is adopting Ampere in all its half a decade old glory in a cut that performs below the lowest laptop RTX and even the MX 570... I don't expect significant advances in audiovisual fidelity any time soon, especially as Microsoft and Sony have been unable to maintain distribution and steady prices for this existing hardware as is (in fact, Microsoft issued an official price hike for all Xbox products this week).

Doesn't the Radeon PRO W9000 series have ROCm support, or is that yet to be revealed? I'm not sure if that means ROCm support on all RDNA 4 cards?!

Nothing is confirmed at this time.

This is based on a Reddit post analyzing patents that may or may not relate to UDNA. RT performance depends on several factors, including base rasterization performance. That said, considering the credibility of the source, it’s best to temper expectations for now.

If AMD decides to go all-in on 2nm, don’t expect low prices. However, significant performance gains are likely, especially since they haven’t adopted GDDR7 yet. When they do, future revisions will likely be much faster.

It is happening, at least for Zen 6.

https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-4-14-amd-achieves-first-tsmc-n2-product-silicon-milesto.html

I made this case before and I'll say it again... for the GPU realm, I believe it's the wrong move, even 2 years from now. These latest generation nodes serve no purpose for home computing anymore. The products are in extremely high demand in stupidly profitable, very high margin, reliable corporate segments. Unless you want the GPU pricing situation to continue and worsen over time, forget about these hyper fancy 3 and 2 nm chips. Make stuff with current 7 and 5 nm technology, it's better for all of us.

Everyone who is saying AMD need to catch up with NV on features or/ML/Ai etc all they want is the same performance/comparable feature set, so it will force NV to lower their prices and they have no intention of buying AMD even if it was to outperform NV, they just beat around the bush and sugarcoat it like they want more competition, they don't, they want more perf from NV for less $, facts! keep buying the monopoly leader and wishing for more performance for less cost, sure that will work out well for you as it has already, or buy the fucking competition and stop complaining about NV charging a kidney for mediocre products that barely improve gen on gen, and it's only got worse with Shatwell..... ohhhhhhhh we want 32/48GB vram cause we want to use our GPU's for pro workloads but only want to pay consumer prices, Ai is a friggen cancer in the tech industry that thanks to the millions of GPU's companies have bought at extortionate prices isn't going away any time soon as they need to recoup that investment, and it will be us paying for it

This rhetoric was weird last year and it's even weirder now. Corporate brand allegiance is something only a dimwit has, GPU vendors are not sports clubs, you don't have to feel proud you have an AMD or Nvidia GPU. This behavior is the primary entry port to justify abusive pricing, especially when there is a large gap in both companies' products. You want to know why I purchased an RTX 5090 over a 9070 XT? Here, this is why:

That's really all there is to it, and at that scale, it was worth both the price (which was my regional MSRP) and even the excruciatingly long wait for it. AMD addressed most of my technological concerns with the 9070 XT, such as the media encoder and OpenGL performance. What they are sorely lacking right now is a compute runtime that is as seamless and broadly supported as CUDA. They are aware of it, they are working on it, they will get there. It takes time. What they cannot offer me right now is the performance I want. The 9070 XT isn't better than the card I had, and the vanilla 9070 barely matches the one I had 5 years ago. Not exactly appetizing, yet... these performance figures are actually excellent, and there is no game that it won't masterfully run right now, at very good resolutions and frame rates. The largest majority of people should be very happy with it, and from the looks of it, they are, because all reports on the internet on both specialized and general media point out that these cards are selling exceptionally well and AMD is recovering market share, as expected.

Once they up their driver release schedule, get ROCm or whatever bundled runtime going, and increase the performance to match NV's, then I'll happily buy another AMD card for my main machine. I need to add though, you missed the critical issue: it's not that gamers pay for expensive cards. We're irrelevant, even as a collective group. They just have next to no incentive to build and maintain gaming cards when they can get the same silicon and sell it to the AI customers at triple the price and half the effort.

 

[Jtuck9]

Why would it be? Sony has their own proprietary tech, and... the PS5 is miserably obsolete technology by now. Pro included. Switch 2 is adopting Ampere in all its half a decade old glory in a cut that performs below the lowest laptop RTX and even the MX 570... I don't expect significant advances in audiovisual fidelity any time soon, especially as Microsoft and Sony have been unable to maintain distribution and steady prices for this existing hardware as is (in fact, Microsoft issued an official price hike for all Xbox products this week).

I was thinking in the context of continuity between the PS5 (Pro) and 6. Supposedly it was codeveloped as part of "Project Amethyst", so interesting to see how that develops going forward.

 

[ARF]

Corporate brand allegiance is something only a dimwit has, GPU vendors are not sports clubs, you don't have to feel proud you have an AMD or Nvidia GPU.

What is your GPU history? Do you work for or at Nvidia ?
GPU vendors are like political parties - one is better for you, another is better for me. Nvidia is greedy and extremely anti-people, while AMD tends to support the people's needs more.
Look at how there are much less AMD Radeon graphics cards which run out of VRAM, exactly the opposite of Nvidia's history of almost always lying to the people and giving less for much more.

 

[Dr. Dro]

What is your GPU history? Do you work for or at Nvidia ?
GPU vendors are like political parties - one is better for you, another is better for me. Nvidia is greedy and extremely anti-people, while AMD tends to support the people's needs more.
Look at how there are much less AMD Radeon graphics cards which run out of VRAM, exactly the opposite of Nvidia's history of almost always lying to the people and giving less for much more.

I guess this is the price of being able to read.

 

[TPUnique]

It's not hardware holding AMD back there, its the software. A new arch wont fix that, they need to build an ecosystem on par with CUDA, and that is gonna take YEARS of work.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

 

[Luminescent]

Well, i already bought an RX 9070xt because i just couldn't pay 1200 euros for what i really wanted, rtx 5070 ti, now they already talk about rdn5, thanks AMD.
Now, i did a little digging after i heard some youtubers, even digital foundry, how AMD does raytracing denoising in SOFTWARE while Nvidia has some specialized hardware just for that, that is true for RDNA2 and 3, RDNA4 has some hardware denoising capability that right now IS NOT USED IN ANY GAME.
Once AMD gets it's hardware raytracing denoising in some games then things should look very well, but, you will never see AMD hardware raytracing denoising in cyberpunk 2077, black myth wukong and some other titles sponsored by Nvidia, just like you won't ever see FSR4 in these titles.
Another reason Nvidia does so well in raster with less VRAM and less power is because they have some advantage in texture compression, as i did a little digging the most used algorithm is BC7 in which Nvidia is better and offers a little more than AMD, outside standard spec, BC7 is used for compatibility with older GPU's.
These technologies are obsolete but are still used for now, both Blackwell and RDNA 4 get ready for neural texture compression, neural raytracing denoising and whatever they agreed for DX13 and PS6.
As usual Nvidia won't want standards because they want to charge the most and be top dog, so they will agree to something standard with Microsoft and AMD and then add something unique to them, then spend a lot of money with game developers and promoting that unique feature.
And that is how you get a monopoly, be unique, be different.

 

[10tothemin9volts]

TPU’s review shows the RX 9070 XT has matched RTX 5070/5070Ti ray tracing. What am I missing here it seems AMD has already caught up.

Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse Review

Sapphire’s Radeon RX 9070 XT Pulse trades flashy extras for substance, to hit its $600 MSRP. There's no RGB lighting or factory overclock, but you get an outstanding cooler that runs whisper-quiet at full load with good temperatures. Performance where it counts.

www.techpowerup.com

Nope, the 5070 Ti is 21% faster in ray-tracing, which also makes it similarly more power efficient (304W vs 300W). ~20% aligns with my other post. 20% difference is not matched (~5% I may call matched). Also, the 5070 Ti (or any Ada/Blackwell GPU (Blackwell is just an Ada refresh)) is ~50% faster and similarly more power efficient (see Source 3) (I don't see path-tracing benchmarks by TechPowerUp for the recent GPUs, so I have to reference other sources) in the visually stunning path-tracing, than the 9070 XT. Compared to a RDNA3 GPU, the difference is 155% or 2.55 times (again, same Source 3: (355W [7900 XTX]/10.2FPS)/(300W [5070 Ti]/22.0FPS)), so AMD has improved nicely and was lucky that NV didn't improve with Blackwell.

.. "Blackwell-esque" Ray Tracing Performance ..

So AMD is trying to catch up on the missing 20%, but the Blackwell successor will be faster again by like 20-33% and AMD would be behind one generation again? Ok.

 

[Luminescent]

Everyone is ignoring the hard thruts, as long as Nvidia has hardware denoising for raytracing and texture compression advantage, AMD will never catch Nvidia, RDNA4 can do it but no one cares, even AMD doesn't care, it's no longer about architecture superiority, it's about anticompetitive practices, don't enable FSR4 in this game, don't optimise for AMD in this game....etc., and AMD does the same when they sponsor a game.
So future game reviews and hardware reviews should spell it out for everyone, the bullshit about architecture doesn't stand anymore, it's all about who is better at anticompetitive practices.

 

[Tomorrow]

Microsoft added hardware scheduling in 2020, with support for Pascal and later GPUs, I'm not sure what you're talking about here. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-hardware-scheduling-tested

Nvidia has plenty of hardware scheduling. They require it for frame gen support, and added even more hardware scheduling for dual AI and CUDA core workloads with Blackwell.

I meant AMD has specific hardware scheduling units in hardware. Nvidia does the same in software. I never said Nvidia does not accelerate other functions with hardware like framegen.

ReBAR is still in the trial phase, essentially. Only Intel's really incorporated it into the GPUs and requires it, Nvidia manages it game-by-game on the driver level even on the GPUs that support it. And it still barely makes a performance difference in most games. It's going to eventually be relevant, but by then, Turing and older cards will be obsolete and too old to run those games anyway.

ReBAR is a very old technology that has been present for many years. Only with 30 series and RDNA 2 was it enabled.
The reason is that in the past it was not really necessary to access VRAM as one large pool and 256MB chunks were fine.
So calling it trial is odd. Every little but helps and it's free performance by enabling an old PCIe feature that was not used before.

My point was that Nvidia shafted it's customers and refused to provide a simple feature that itä's competitor enabled for much older cards.

Are we doing this, again? This has already been explained to death many times. Your generations are off btw, you mean 40 and 50 series. Frame gen required the massively improved Optical Flow Accelerator in the 40 series, the OFA in the 30 and 20 series did not run fast enough to provide real-time interpolation of video games (but could still interpolate videos). The best they could have gotten is 1 interpolated frame every 4-5 "real" frames, which doesn't provide a meaningful performance improvement and would have just massively increased latency. On the 50 series, Optical Flow runs on the tensor cores, but requires the massively increased low-precision compute of the NEW FP4 hardware support. The 40 series and older just don't have the TOPS to do Optical Flow on the tensor cores or multi-frame gen without FP4 hardware (yet).

That's verifiably false. If 20 series users can run AMD's framegen with good performance and image quality then there's no doubt Nvidia could do much better job if it wished. Their OFA excuse is pathetic. Either AMD's framegen on Nvidia cards entirely bypasses OFA or Nvidia is so incompetent gen after gen that they cant backport features to their older cards because of their constantly underpowered hardware in each gen. Neither looks good for them.

That's because FSR 4 runs on tensor cores now instead of on the shaders. And again, comparing same generations, AMD is behind yet again, with just FP8 support in RDNA 4 vs FP4 support in Blackwell, which means no multi-frame gen. This is actually something that UDNA will hopefully address, because AMD has FP4 in their latest CDNA lineup, which shows how much the disconnect between consumer and enterprise architecture has hurt AMD.

RDNA 4 and likely earlier generations will have multi framegen. AMD already proved that framegen does not require specialized hardware. Yes it does benefit from hardware accelerators, but it's not essential. Upscaling is a different story and here it seems hardware acceleration is essential for the best image quality.

And for UDNA, yes they'll have node parity and an improvement, but they had that with RDNA 3 and 4.

No they didn't. RDNA 3 was mix of 5nm and 6nm. Not to mention first chiplet GPU and it's associated growing pains. 40 series was 5nm. Thus in my eyes Nvidia had a node advantage. This gen they are both on the same node. Nvidia is better here no doubt but not by miles. For example 9070 XT is a 304W card. 5070 Ti is a 300W card. Both use 16GB of VRAM and both are roughly the same size of chip (Nvidia's is a little larger). 5070 Ti is on average 9% faster while using a slightly larger chip and a bit less power (TPU's GPU database).

 

[ARF]

You want to know why I purchased an RTX 5090 over a 9070 XT? Here, this is why:

I guess this is the price of being able to read.

It depends on the point of view. I think performance per money is still king.

ASUS Radeon RX 9070 XT TUF OC Review

The ASUS Radeon RX 9070 XT TUF OC is the company's flagship model. It comes with a thick, metal cooler frame that looks fantastic. Our testing confirms, that this is the most powerful cooler of all the cards tested so far, and noise levels with the quiet BIOS are excellent, too.

www.techpowerup.com

But there are also other drawbacks for RTX 5090:
1. Melting power connector;
2. Too large and heavy - sagging issues;
3. 32 GB is an overkill;
4. Extremely overpriced;
5. There are better options on the market;
6. Depending on the settings, there are cases where there is no perceivable user experience difference between the RX 9070 XT and RTX 5090:

ASUS GeForce RTX 5090 Astral Liquid OC Review - The Most Expensive GPU I've Ever Tested

The $3400 ASUS GeForce RTX 5090 Astral Liquid OC is the company's flagship RTX 5090 model. It uses a 360 mm liquid cooling solution to handle the 600 W heat output of the RTX 5090 GPU. Testing in our review confirms: it's the fastest RTX 5090, with lowest temps and best thermals, but also with...

www.techpowerup.com

This is a measly 32% performance drop from RTX 5090 to RX 9070 XT.

 

[Vya Domus]

Nvidia's advantage with CUDA is it works on every single product

Except it doesn't beyond surface level, CUDA is very segmented in terms of feature support because the hardware is also segmented in terms of capabilities. It's the same as saying "DirectX works on every single product", except some products don't support certain features.

 

[Rightness_1]

NV have not pushed RT forward anywhere near where it should be, especially with the Ada refresh AKA Blackwell. RT needs a significant performance increase to be useable on all but the top 2-3 SKUs.

RT is still almost a no-go on anything less than a 5070Ti, unless 30fps is your bag.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Everyone is ignoring the hard thruts, as long as Nvidia has hardware denoising for raytracing and texture compression advantage, AMD will never catch Nvidia, RDNA4 can do it but no one cares, even AMD doesn't care, it's no longer about architecture superiority, it's about anticompetitive practices, don't enable FSR4 in this game, don't optimise for AMD in this game....etc., and AMD does the same when they sponsor a game.
So future game reviews and hardware reviews should spell it out for everyone, the bullshit about architecture doesn't stand anymore, it's all about who is better at anticompetitive practices.

Most of these points remain self-owns that no one but AMD can be blamed for, such as the FSR 4 situation. They're already back to their old ways of doing driver level DLL overrides, fail to provide a documented API for developers (as of today, there is no documentation regarding FSR 4 available on their GPUOpen site). Really, I don't need to remind you that it took 7 years for AMD to finally add dedicated matrix multiplication units to their hardware. Seven years.

To get FSR 4 in games at this point in time, you're relying on a driver level override onto an FSR 3 entrypoint, it was the only way AMD found to have any meaningful amount of supported titles without actually working with developers to get it done. DLSS is thoroughly documented, has a proper API, allows the user to configure its automatic exposure, training model preset, resolution, etc. - even though this is not always exposed with intuitive controls to the user as they are intended to be developer-facing. But it's there.

Things have never been better at the red camp than they are right now. What you need to do is keep in mind that AMD is not a charity, they do not "genuinely care about gamers", and they are coming from a severely weakened market position, so they have to look appealing to claw back market share. If the tables were turned they would do the same thing Nvidia does.

Except it doesn't beyond surface level, CUDA is very segmented in terms of feature support because the hardware is also segmented in terms of capabilities. It's the same as saying "DirectX works on every single product", except some products don't support certain features.

True, yet very much a developer concern. CUDA offers compute capability levels which tier the hardware and makes it very clear to the developer what the hardware they are developing against can support, for example, the RTX 3050 laptop GPU (GA107) supports compute capability level 8.6 - regardless of the CUDA runtime version, it will run everything that level 8.6 can provide and whatever is retroactively added to this compute capability tier. It's the same thing that DirectX does with its feature levels, which is why it's possible to run DirectX 12 Ultimate (12_2) games on hardware like the RX 5700 XT, which doesn't support the extended features of Ultimate, or why you can run a DirectX 12 game on a GTX 600/Kepler GPU with feature level 11_0, or DirectX 11 games on hardware like the Radeon HD 4000 series with 10_1 level.

Utter nonsense

Stop embarrassing yourself.

 

[Luminescent]

Most of these points remain self-owns that no one but AMD can be blamed for, such as the FSR 4 situation. They're already back to their old ways of doing driver level DLL overrides, fail to provide a documented API for developers (as of today, there is no documentation regarding FSR 4 available on their GPUOpen site). Really, I don't need to remind you that it took 7 years for AMD to finally add dedicated matrix multiplication units to their hardware. Seven years.

To get FSR 4 in games at this point in time, you're relying on a driver level override onto an FSR 3 entrypoint, it was the only way AMD found to have any meaningful amount of supported titles without actually working with developers to get it done. DLSS is thoroughly documented, has a proper API, allows the user to configure its automatic exposure, training model preset, resolution, etc. - even though this is not always exposed with intuitive controls to the user as they are intended to be developer-facing. But it's there.

Things have never been better at the red camp than they are right now. What you need to do is keep in mind that AMD is not a charity, they do not "genuinely care about gamers", and they are coming from a severely weakened market position, so they have to look appealing to claw back market share. If the tables were turned they would do the same thing Nvidia does.

True, all true and nothing will change, they have no interest in improving or moving forward the gaming industry, they just want to make an easy buck and Nvidia keeps pushing them to be better for consumers , all AMD want is a new TSMC node every few years for a new Playstation generation and call it a day.
I really hope they try to be better this time, RDNA4 has it all except software support.

 

[Hecate91]

But there are also other drawbacks for RTX 5090:
1. Melting power connector;
2. Too large and heavy - sagging issues;
3. 32 GB is an overkill;
4. Extremely overpriced;
5. There are better options on the market;
6. Depending on the settings, there are cases where there is no perceivable user experience difference between the RX 9070 XT and RTX 5090:

I would add another drawback.
#7. Buggy drivers, it seems like Nvidia is using AI to QA/QC their drivers, and I couldn't imagine paying the green team tax to experience black screens and games crashing.
I think it's a disappointing double standard how no one seems to criticize Nvidia when their drivers are causing issues.
But you can't reason or have your own opinion with users who will always buy Nvidia anyway.

 

[bug]

CUDA is still king. AMD has recently ramped up its efforts in that area, but it'll take time.

That's what Microsoft said about Windows Mobile. Or what Google said about Google+.

 

[blacksea76]

Yes, because if you want to compete, you need to offer something better than the other guy. Being worse in every feature but $50 cheaper is a losing strategy and has relegated AMD to irrelevance in the discrete GPU market.



It was revolutionary because it was revolutionary 2 years ago. Again, being two years behind your competitor means you lose, plain and simple.



Okay, but that makes it even worse for AMD, right? Matching Lovelace with UDNA 5 years later would be truly abysmal RT performance. I'm not terribly impressed by Blackwell either, but it was the best Nvidia could do on the same node. Rubin will be on 3nm.

Worse in every feature? Are you sure? Better take your green badge out and show it Fanboys will be fanboys forever.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I would add another drawback.
#7. Buggy drivers, it seems like Nvidia is using AI to QA/QC their drivers, and I couldn't imagine paying the green team tax to experience black screens and games crashing.
I think it's a disappointing double standard how no one seems to criticize Nvidia when their drivers are causing issues.
But you can't reason or have your own opinion with users who will always buy Nvidia anyway.

AI for quality assurance sure is a novel conspiracy theory, but not really, no. A lot of people seem to be under the impression they just "disabled" 32-bit CUDA on 50 series to shift some RTX 3050s to fanboys and didn't do anything else... if it was just that, someone would have patched the Nvidia driver to reenable PhysX support already.

No, they are obviously refactoring driver code. It's the exact same reason AMD had dogshit drivers for the past 4 years and suddenly, it's actually rather good - they've been extensively rewriting their kernel and user mode drivers - something they just got finished with recently. I'll apply to equal measure for both vendors, I know why it's happening, I just fail to see where that is the customer's problem. At least Nvidia is releasing fixes at a very fast pace to make up for it. I know they will make up for it, as 566.36, the last Release 565 driver, literally had no open issues at the time of its release and both Release 550 and Release 535 drivers which were kept around in the enterprise models are extremely polished by now.

They have already announced that the 900 and 10 series GPUs will be retired with CUDA 13.0 and the next driver branch, so I'm positive they are laying a foundation for future driver releases and a minimum baseline for software to target once the newer drivers ultimately drop these products.

Worse in every feature? Are you sure? Better take your green badge out and show it Fanboys will be fanboys forever.

Positively sure. More than half of the 9070 XT's media presentation at launch was literally them showing that they fixed many shortcomings of RDNA 3 that made those cards markedly worse than their Ada Lovelace competitors... but Blackwell isn't a mere re-release of Ada. There are many improvements to it.