Real-time ray tracing in PC games is associated with Nvidia for pioneering the technology with the creation of custom RT and AI hardware. AMD is aware that it is currently behind Nvidia in ray tracing performance, but the company aims to reverse this situation or at least match its rival in the next generation.
AMD entered the RT space with hardware-accelerated ray tracing with the RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series, but the results showed it was at best a generation behind Nvidia. With the arrival of the Radeon RX 7000 series with RDNA 3 support, AMD has made some welcome improvements to hardware-accelerated ray tracing performance. On the other hand, he still could not catch his opponent.
AMD focuses on ray tracing
Still, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, according to AMD’s Radeon chief, Scott Herkelman. So much so that AMD takes second-class ray tracing performance into account when pricing new GPUs like the 7700 XT and 7800 XT. “We take ray tracing performance into account when making our price calculations,” says Scott Herkelman in an interview. We’re aware that Radeon products lag behind when it comes to ray tracing performance, which is one of the reasons why the upcoming Radeon RX 7800 XT is priced lower than its direct competitor, the GeForce RTX 4070.
Pointing to the RDNA 4 and RDNA 5 architectures currently being developed, Herkleman says, “We must do better in future generations and make sure we have the right architecture for efficient ray tracing.” On the other hand, with Intel showing that Arc-based graphics cards can do real-time ray tracing even at the mainstream level, AMD needs to step up on RT.
However, ray tracing has matured considerably in recent years. The upcoming releases of Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty and Alan Wakew 2 aim to take significant advantage of the technology. Although we will see the peak visuals in these games with the highest performance on Nvidia cards for now, it seems that it will not be long before AMD enters the equation.
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