AMD’s David Wang was heard voicing his opinions about how AMD considers pushing off the ray tracing technology till it gets adopted by large number of games, and is possible to be implemented on the entire lineup of products, including both low end and high end GPUs. (via 4gamer)
Ray tracing was one of the key features developed for improving visuals through the use of deep learning. The technology aimed to boost visuals across all supported titles significantly. Ray tracing, at this point, is a pretty costly technique that requires quite some research and development and large scale implementation before it becomes the next stage of video game visuals.
AMD’s announcement has big implications for the gaming market, since that means next gen consoles won’t likely be supporting ray tracing either, since they will be running on the mid-end Navi GPUs which, in all probability, won’t be supporting ray tracing. Pushing off the implementation of ray tracing, which takes a significant performance hit (thanks to the intense amount of computation required), looks like a smart move, since there is no way to determine whether developers will adopt it on a large scale or not. That can always mean the high end Navi GPUs might be pumped with RT cores to allow them to compete with leading NVIDIA cards should ray tracing become the norm. (via
