AMD bringing real-time ray tracing to its GPUs soon
Following Nvidia’s recent announcement that it is bringing real-time ray tracing to its next-generation Volta GPUs, AMD has made its own announcement about its plans for introducing the technology. Unlike Nvidia’s proprietary solution, AMD’s solution works with the open source Vulcan 3D graphics and compute API.
Dubbed Radeon Rays 2.0, AMD’s new ray tracing engine will render photorealistic lighting patterns like shadows and reflections in real-time. In addition to being made available to professional 3D artists, AMD says its tools will also make creating even more realistic games a reality. Expect to see a AAA title either launch with the technology, or be patched to support it, in the next couple of months.
Not only is AMD’s real-time ray tracing engine open source, it will also work with its current generation of GPUs. Currently, Nvidia’s RTX real-time ray tracing technology will only work on its yet to be released Volta GPUs. However, Nvidia is working with Microsoft to make its technology compatible with its DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, which could make it backwards compatible with older cards.