After the announcement of DirectX 12 Ultimate, AMD confirmed that it will support this API on its RDNA 2 GPUs scheduled to arrive in the second half of the year and took the opportunity to show a ray tracing demo running on a working Navi 2X silicon.
This demo uses DirectX RayTracing 1.1, which runs on DirectX 12 Ultimate, and has a large number of reflective surfaces that take full advantage of the GPU. In fact, the GPU was squeezed more than necessary, and several users stated that in their opinion it did not even reach 30 FPS.
It should be noted that this is a prototype of Navi 2X, and it’s neither the hardware nor the final software, so there’s still plenty of room for improvement. AMD simply wanted to show that they already had technology capable of performing hardware ray tracing and that they would soon be able to compete with Nvidia’s RTX line.
Navi 2X Ray Tracing Demo Video:
The RDNA 2 architecture will be found in the future generation of AMD Radeon graphics and also in the new Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 and will support hardware ray tracing, variable-rate shading, mesh shading and many other features to achieve maximum performance and maximum graphics quality.