The ray tracing conversation has been dominated by Nvidia with its RTX line of GPUs. But that doesn’t mean AMD is shunning the tech altogether.
In a CES 2020 roundtable interview transcribed by Anandtech, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su has confirmed that ray tracing is something the red team is investing in, but it’s just early days.
“I do believe though it is still very early, and the ecosystem needs to develop,” she said. “We need more games and more software and more applications to take advantage of it. At AMD, we feel very good about our position on ray-tracing.”
Dr. Su stated how both the Xbox Series X and PS5, powered by AMD, have hardware-based raytracing. “We are investing heavily in ray tracing and investing heavily in the ecosystem around it – both of our console partners have also said that they are using ray tracing,” she said. “You should expect that our discrete graphics as we go through 2020 will also have ray tracing.”
And for folks who want AMD to expand the current Radeon line, the 5000 Series (Navi), to go beyond 1440p gaming, Dr. Su also heard you loud and clear. “I know those on Reddit want a high-end Navi!” she laughs. “You should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, and that it is important to have it.”
At CES 2020, AMD revealed the Radeon RX 5600 GPU, and more Radeon GPUs for laptops. The bigger deal was the reveal of the 7nm Ryzen 4000 CPU and the monstrous, 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 3990X CPU.