Gears 5 Dev reveals “dedicated ray tracing cores” on Project Scarlett – Points to future Radeon graphics tech

Gears 5 Dev reveals

Gears 5 Dev reveals “dedicated ray tracing cores” on Project Scarlett

In a recent interview with GameSpot, Colin Penty, Gears 5’s technical art director, revealed some new information about Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox Console, Project Scarlett. 

In this interview, Penty stated that “Having dedicated ray tracing cores is huge”, confirming that Project Scarlett features dedicated raytracing hardware. Given the fact that AMD has confirmed that they are working on hardware-accelerated raytracing, it is likely that these raytracing cores are a part of an AMD Radeon graphics component. 

While Penty couldn’t elaborate on Scarlett’s specifications, his statement reconfirmed that Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox would include dedicated ray tracing hardware. Beyond that, it also seems likely that AMD’s next-generation RDNA graphics cards will also feature similar “ray tracing cores”. 

Below is Colin Penty’s full statement regarding Xbox Scarlett.


We don’t have anything to announce right now in terms of Gears with the new hardware–but I’m definitely super excited about what the new hardware could do. Having dedicated ray tracing cores is huge.

Gears 5 Dev reveals  

Microsoft’s Project Scarlett will be powered by AMD Zen 2 CPU cores and Radeon RDNA graphics hardware. The console is due to ship in holiday 2020, making it likely that we will see Radeon GPUs with similar ray tracing features within the same timeframe. 

Raytracing will prove to be a major feature of Microsoft’s Project Scarlett console, though at this time it remains to be seen how developers will utilise the functionality. Sony’s next-generation PlayStation is also likely to offer the same feature set, starting a new era of hybrid raytracing with the next generation of consoles. 

Gears 5 Dev reveals  

You can join the discussion on Project Scarlett’s dedicated raytracing cores on the OC3D Forums.Â