Following the reveal of AMD’s Radeon RX 5600 XT, we wondered what the future would hold for Radeon’s RDNA graphics architecture. We know that Microsoft and Sony will have consoles with ray-tracing support via hardware, but we weren’t sure that the new Navi graphics cards that will be released later this year will do the same. The answer has arrived at CES.
We can expect AMD to release Radeon Navi graphics cards with ray tracing acceleration before the end of 2020
In an interview after the opening speech, Lisa Su of AMD answered this question about Ray Tracing: “You should expect that when we go into 2020, our discreet graphics will have Ray Tracing. This makes sense given the timetable for the introduction of the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft. Both systems will be launched in the fourth quarter of 2020, which means that by then AMD should be more than capable of bringing a ray-tracing capable graphics card to market, as both consoles are configured to support this hardware technology.
In response to a question from Gordon Ung of PC World, Lisa Su confirmed that AMD has “a high-end Navi card” in the works. Lisu Su then explained that she normally “does not comment on unannounced products”. This confirms that AMD is planning a high-end graphics card in the near future, which will finally make AMD compete with graphics cards like the RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 2080 Super from Nvidia.
It is not yet clear whether the AMD high-end navigation card will have the same architecture as the current RX 5000 series. This question is difficult to answer at the moment.
What we know at the moment is that we can expect AMD to release Radeon graphics cards with ray tracing acceleration before the end of 2020. We don’t know its shape, only that it will come. Maybe there will be more “official” news at Computex in June. We will keep you posted.