AMD job listing reveals a “focus on ray tracing” after RDNA 2’s launch

 

A new job listing for the “AMD Game Engineering team” has announced the company’s plans to “focus on ray tracing” after the release of the company’s RDNA 2 graphics architecture.

AMD’s Game Engineering team works with external game developers to help make their games operate “as efficiently as possible”. Many of these optimisations will impact all gaming PCs, though AMD’s staff will work to optimise games with Ryzen/Radeon CPU, APUs and discrete GPUs in mind.

Within AMD’s job listing, one of the key responsibilities of their “Game Engineering” role will be to “Integrate features into game titles with a focus on ray tracing”, confirming AMD’s plans to help integrate ray tracing into future PC titles. This focus on ray tracing makes sense given AMD’s support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and the fact that their architecture is a common factor between Radeon-powered PCs and both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. 

With both next-generation consoles featuring support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, it makes sense for AMD to focus on this graphical feature moving forward. In time, future games may require ray tracing support to operate, and AMD needs to prepare for that. 
 

 
Alongside support for ray tracing and other RDNA 2 features, AMD has already confirmed that RDNA 2 is going to deliver a massive 50% improvement in power efficiency over RDNA, a feat which highlights how much AMD has improved their graphics technology in the run-up to the next console generation. 

RDNA 2 will represent a massive leap for AMD in terms of efficiency, performance and hardware features, representing a transformative shift for Radeon’s hardware stack. The demo video above showcases the ray tracing capabilities of AMD’s early RDNA 2 silicon using Microsoft’s DirectX Ray tracing (DXR 1.1) API.

  

While many saw ray tracing as a gimmick with the release of Nvidia’s RTX 20 series of graphics cards, it is now clear that hardware-accelerated ray tracing will become critical as both PC and console hardware moves into the next generation. Both Sony and Microsoft have showcases games which utilise hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which means that gamers should expect ray tracing to be used in a lot of future titles. 

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