AMD hints at ray tracing in the future

But, after AMD Navi

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AMDhas hinted that it’s going to start working on ray tracing in the future, during theBank of America Merrill Lynch 2019 Global Technology Conference. But, of course, these discussions will happen afterAMD Navihits the streets.

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Senior VP of Marketing, HR and Investor Relations Ruth Cotter spoke during the conference, saying that she’s “not going to steal Lisa’s thunder on the live cast on Monday”, referring to theE3 2019keynote where more Navi information will be shared by AMD CEO Lisa Su.

At E3, AMD is going to go into more detail about AMD Navi, and the RDNA architecture powering it, rather than diving into ray tracing asNvidiahas with itsTuringarchitecture. This all but confirms that ray tracing won’t be an active feature of AMD Navi, but we’ve heard speculation that it will be included in theNavi 20 GPUs rumored for 2020.

So what?

At the time of writing, despite all of the hype around Nvidia’s RTX technology, only three titles actually use it:Metro Exodus,Shadow of the Tomb RaiderandBattlefield V, with Quake II RTX serving as sort of a tech demo. Nvidia clearly has the upper hand when it comes to ray tracing tech, but is it really necessary for AMD to jump on the trainright now?

Well,RTX adoption is slowing down, with Nvidia’s non-RTXGTX 1660 Timaking the fastest gains in its Turing portfolio. With Navi, it looks like AMD is trying to compete with the likes of theRTX 2070when it comes to compute power, but without the ray tracing.

And, now that we’ve seen rumors that AMD is getting ready to introducefiveAMD Navi graphics cards, we could see AMD put out an entire lineup of graphics cards, appealing to folks that see ray tracing as a gimmick.

We don’t know exactly what AMD Navi is going to be capable of, or what it will cost. But, if AMD is able to offer better or equivalent performance in games at a lower cost, we could start seeing Team Red take the GPU market by stormlike it did with desktop CPUsearlier this year.

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Then again, Nvidia has teased something “Super” for its GeForce graphics cards, rumored for anE3 2019 reveal, so we’ll just have to wait until the giant gaming event next week to see what will happen in thegraphics cardscene.

ViaPCGamesN

Bill Thomas (Twitter) is TechRadar’s computing editor. They are fat, queer and extremely online. Computers are the devil, but they just happen to be a satanist. If you need to know anything about computing components, PC gaming or the best laptop on the market, don’t be afraid to drop them a line on Twitter or through email.

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