AMD, oh how we all held faith for what, more than ten years? We always wanted to see them stick it to Intel for at least a generation and get competition really cooking. On the graphics card side, AMD always competed well with AMD in the low to mid ranges, but they didn’t have a champion series of graphics cards to really go after the enthusiast market, but just like they took it steady with their Ryzen products, it seems they’re building a foundation with graphics cards right now too.
With RDNA 2 AMD are wanting to improve on the performance of the last generation by around 50%. I mean, of course they do. However, wanting to do it, saying they’ll do it, and actually doing it are all different things. Not only that, but they’ll also bring improvements in other areas with logic enhancements and higher clock speeds.
Ray Tracing
Nvidia may be running the ray tracing show at the moment. However, keep in mind RT is a feature of DirectX RT, not Nvidia drivers, they’re just the first to market with an accelerator. AMD will be throwing their hat in that ring with RDNA 2. We also know this hardware will be in next-gen consoles, so it looks like ray tracing is going to hit primetime later this year.
What AMD Had to Say
“We have developed all-new hardware-accelerated ray tracing as part of RDNA 2. It is a common architecture used in next-generation game consoles. With that, you will greatly simplify the content development that developers can develop for one platform and easily port it to the other.
We also provide lower-level API support that gives more control to the developers so that they can extract more performance from the underlying hardware platform. This will help mitigate the performance concerns of ray tracing.” – AMD’s David Wang
