AMD – ‘We Need to Start Talking About Ray Tracing’

AMD & Ray Tracing

Since Nvidia brought ray tracing to the market with their 20XX range of graphics cards, while AMD has acknowledged the technology, they have hardly been in a hurry to introduce it themselves. Even with a brand new range of graphics cards on the horizon, it’s exceptionally unlikely that any of the models will include any hardware dedicated ray tracing support.

In a report via PCGamesN, however, a senior member of AMD has said that while he doesn’t want to give away any secrets, the company ‘needs to start talking about ray tracing’.

E3 2019

As part of E3 2019, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su is expected to discuss their latest graphics card range at an event on Monday. This following something of a tease made at Computex last week surrounding further details on their 5XXX range.

Ruth Cotter, who is the senior VP of marketing, HR, and investor relations has, however, jumped the gun a little by saying:

“We have said that we will share more about our Navi family of products as part of a live cast at E3. We’ll also want to give you a little more information around our RDNA architecture and we’re very excited about that as we think about PCIe 4, GDDR6, another architectural features that we will bring to that architecture that will be sustainable over multiple generations.

And then, in time, obviously, we need to start to talk about what our ray tracing strategy is moving forward.”

What Do We Think?

Ultimately, AMD’s decision to not jump onto the ray tracing band-wagon has probably been a smart one. Despite what you may think of the technology, what is abundantly clear is that following the release of Nvidia’s 20XX graphics cards, the gaming market has still yet to really catch-up and start offering true support for it. By this, I mean games designed with the technology in mind rather than retrofitted.

With AMD already being on record saying that they’ll only bring ray tracing when it’s ready, however, they’ve fired enough shots at Nvidia to have set some rather lofty expectations of themselves.

What do you think? Are you interested in their new graphics card range? Should AMD shift their focus to ray tracing? – Let us know in the comments!

Tell Me More!

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