AMD details their Radeon Ray Tracing Vision with RDNA

It has been confirmed that both the next-generation Xbox and PlayStation will support hardware accelerated Ray Tracing, which will come as part of custom SOCs which are being developed by AMD. 

At E3 2019, AMD has confirmed that their upcoming Navi series of RX 5700 graphics cards will lack support for hardware accelerated ray tracing, dismissing the need for the technology at this time, with DXR enabled games being rare and extremely heavy on graphics performance. 

AMD’s thoughts on the matter are that they should deliver ray tracing support when both the software and hardware ecosystems are ready, which is why the feature is set to arrive with the company’s “Next Gen RDNA” graphics hardware. This means that we should expect ray tracing hardware from AMD before the release of Sony/Microsoft’s next-generation consoles. 

With the launch of next-generation gaming systems, ray tracing compatible hardware will be delivered to the masses, creating a ray tracing ecosystem which spans PC, Xbox and PlayStation, which is more than enough to get developers working on the feature. Yes, Nvidia will have a head start with their RTX series, but AMD will launch at a time where ray tracing will be a larger selling point and launch with the kind of hardware acceleration that developers will be utilising on consoles. Nvidia has the head start, but AMD will have a broader raytracing ecosystem.