Rumor: AMD's Navi 20 series could feature ray-tracing technology that would challenge Nvidia's RTX lineup

It appears that AMD could be considering releasing a Navi 20 series with ray-tracing capabilities. It’s important to state before delving into this particular rumor that it seems to be basically based on a source of a source of even another source – in other words it’s impossible to verify at the moment and could end up being just whispers in the wind. But there’s no doubt that the idea of AMD’s Navi 20 GPUs featuring their own ray-tracing tech is an interesting one - after all, the company's CEO has already admitted that there is work being carried out in regard to ray-tracing development.

A video from RedGamingTech, discovered by PCGamesN, claims that AMD is not only polishing and refining its GCN microarchitecture but is also planning on making some “fundamental changes” in regard to Navi 20 in particular: In other words, ray-tracing technology that at the very least matches the high-end graphics cards of Nvidia’s RTX 20 series. It’s quite a claim, but it might take something like this for AMD to pull share away from the green team at this end of the market.

Apparently, AMD’s goal is to release a Navi 10 lineup this year, which should feature products that can compete against Nvidia GPUs such as the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce RTX 2070 in terms of level of gaming performance. This should pave the way for the eventual release of the Navi 20 series at some point in 2020, which could include chips that match the best Nvidia has – and even beat them. For AMD to succeed in this, it would certainly help if the Navi 20 GPUs offer the "extremely impressive" performance in ray-tracing technology as is reported in the RedGamingTech clip.

There’s no denying AMD is likely improving its Graphics Core Next architecture for the Navi 10 and Navi 20 GPUs, but the truth will only really be known once the chips are actually officially launched. At some point, the red team should supply a product that competently faces off against the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, but that seems to point at the result of AMD’s 7nm+ Next Gen plans (which is possibly "Arcturus").