“Redstone” is the code name for AMD’s next-gen graphics software that leans heavily on frame generation via machine learning, and the first major game to get a taste of it is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, a mouthful of a shooter that’s launching today. According to promotional messages from AMD, Radeon 9000 users get “Ray Generation” at launch.
Machine Learning Ray Generation (to give it its own mouthful of a name) is how a Radeon card learns patterns for an advanced lighting engine and then applies those patterns, in an approximate manner, in real time. This is a further development of the sort of thing that Nvidia applied with DLSS years ago, now taken to greater heights with more complex lighting systems that can reduce noise and grit in ray tracing by rendering at a lower resolution and then upscaling in a very targeted manner.
In layman’s terms? ML Ray Generation makes game lighting look really good, at least on supported hardware. But it likely requires “training” on each game, which could explain why it’s so limited in the initial release.
As VideoCardz notes, ML Ray Generation is only one of the four features outlined in AMD’s FSR Redstone. The latest versions of frame generation, super resolution, and neural radiance caching don’t appear to be live in Black Ops 7, at least not at launch.
So far, the Radeon RX 9000 series has only launched five cards since debuting in March: the Radeon RX 9060, 9060 XT, 9070, 9070 XT, and the limited release 9070 GRE. Though it’s being heavily featured by Call of Duty developer Activision—and continues to gain major ground in the desktop CPU space with its Ryzen X3D series—AMD has nonetheless fallen further behind Nvidia in consumer market share for graphics cards.
