AMD says “we need to start to talk about our ray tracing strategy”
We’ve heard a lot from AMD this last week over at Computex regarding AMD Ryzen 3000 and AMD Navi, but there’s still quite a bit we don’t know about the company’s forward-looking strategy. But thankfully there’s always another event or two going down that we can glean bits of information from, and the latest from the corporate world indicates AMD could be readying up to talk ray tracing strategy.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that has long been held as the “holy grail” of graphics tech. That’s because, if implemented just right, ray tracing can be used to create photorealistic scenes with accurate shadowing, reflections, and illumination. We’re still not quite at the point of photorealistic gaming just yet, however, and so far only Nvidia has dedicated silicon in its GPUs to power such an experience.
But AMD has expressed interest in ray tracing, with the latest coming from senior VP of marketing, HR, and investor relations, Ruth Cotter, during the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2019 Global Technology Conference yesterday. Or, for brevity’s sake, the BoAML19GTC… yeah, it’s not much better. During the talk the AMD exec briefly touched upon the company’s upcoming products and a little on its eventual entry into the ray tracing market.
“I’m not going to steal Lisa’s thunder on the live cast on Monday,” Cotter says (via Seeking Alpha), “but we have said that we will share more about our Navi family of products as part of a live cast at E3. We’ll also want to give you a little more information around our RDNA architecture and we’re very excited about that as we think about PCIe 4, GDDR6, another architectural features that we will bring to that architecture that will be sustainable over multiple generations.
“And then, in time, obviously, we need to start to talk about what our ray tracing strategy is moving forward.”
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ray-tracing-hardware-software-ecosystem-graphics