The new generation of consoles will implement hardware-based ray tracing , although AMD only confirmed this this week. Specifically, during Financial Analyst Day this week, the company confirmed new GPUs with hardware-based ray tracing. RDNA2 will be the one to implement dedicated hardware for calculating light rays in video games.
This will be the time for AMD to catch up with NVIDIA in the hardware segment. The great commitment of NVIDIA has forced AMD to implement this technology at a forced marches by market demands. Game developers have been very supportive of RayTracing, as have Sony and Microsoft.
[amazon box="B07VXNDGK5"]AMD RDNA2 will integrate hardware for RayTracing
There is much interest in seeing the RDNA2 architecture, a greatly improved version over RDNA that removes all trailing elements from GCN. A large increase in the IPC, improvement in the logic circuit or greater energy efficiency is expected. Some rumors point to reducing consumption by 50%, something that could be quite plausible.
To our knowledge RDNA2 will remain on the 7nm node, although it will be a slightly improved version. Based on what is known, the TSMC node N7P could be used, which offers some improvements over the current node.
But the interesting thing is that we have seen the first image with RayTracing rendered by an RDNA2 graph. This is also possible thanks to Microsoft's DXR 1.1 API, the RayTracing library that NVIDIA already uses. The image is a futuristic setting with water, metal elements and glass, so there are many reflections in the scene.
What we do not know is how this new technology will affect the performance of AMD graphics. As we already see in the NVIDIA graphics, having RayTracing active supposes a drop in FPS of up to 30%. A sacrifice in performance, which to some extent, is worth it.
Source: MD
