AMD Confirm All DX12 GPUs Support Ray Tracing – Just Not Yet
Mike Sanders / 5 years ago
AMD Confirm Is Has Ray Tracing Compatibility
One of the biggest ‘buzzwords’ since the release of the Nvidia 20XX series of graphics cards has been ‘ray tracing’. The technology essentially allows their graphics card to render ultra-realistic light settings in a real-time environment. To date, however, AMD has shown little interest in getting involved in it. In fairness, even the community is currently divided as to whether Nvidia rushed this out the door sooner than it was ready.
In a report via DSOGaming, however, AMD has confirmed that all of their graphics cards that support DX12 can use ray tracing via Microsoft’s DXR fallback layer.
DXR Fallout
The DXR Fallback option via the latest version allows for (essentially) ray tracing to be ’emulated’. As such, any AMD graphics card that directly supports the latest version of DirectX can, hypothetically, be capable of rendering ray tracing graphics. It seems, however, that despite the potential, AMD does not want to release the driver update to make it happen.
Ray Tracing VS Performance
Even with the best graphics cards that Nvidia has to offer, turning ray tracing on has a huge impact on the performance of a game. As such, given AMD’s rather limited hardware capabilities (in conjunction with what is believed to be poor ’emulation’) while an AMD 480 could potentially run a game with ray tracing on, it’s largely believed that the experience would be in single-digit framerate territory. In other words, not worth it. Speaking of which…
This does, however, provide further details on comments made by AMD last month. Specifically when they hinted that ray tracing was a possibility, but they wouldn’t do it ‘until it was worth it’.
So, from the 4XX to the Radeon VII, they can potentially support ray tracing. I wouldn’t, however, expect to see Team Red ever release it for those cards. It wouldn’t do them any favours!
What do you think? Now this has been revealed, do you think someone will try and jailbreak the option? – Let us know in the comments!
