INCOMING / NEWS
AMD CONFIRMS
‘ENTHUSIASTCLASS’ RAY
TRACING GPUS FOR 2020
AMD has revealed that its next-gen gaming
GPUs are scheduled to be released in late- Unlike the company’s first RDNA Navi
products, such as the Radeon RX 5700 XT,
the new RDNA 2-based GPUs will also
support hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
AMD unveiled these details about its new
GPUs at its Financial Analyst Day on 5 March,
while also revealing that RDNA 3 is in
development, with products expected
before the end of 2022.
The company describes its forthcoming
RDNA 2 GPUs as ‘enthusiast-class’, with
‘uncompromising 4K gaming’, meaning they
could potentially take on Nvidia’s top-end
GPUs, rather than competing in the mid-
range like AMD’s current Navi chips.
In addition to hardware-accelerated ray
tracing, AMD also promises up to a 50 per
cent improvement in performance per watt
for RDNA 2 chips over their 1st-gen
RDNA predecessors.
The company puts the improvements
down to logic enhancements and
optimisations to the new microarchitecture,
enabling it to reduce the complexity and
switching power of the new chips, as well as
improve the performance per clock and
increase the clock speed.
According to AMD, the new GPUs will also
fully support Microsoft’s recently announced
DirectX 12 Ultimate API.
RDNA 2 will also support variable rate
shading (VRS), another feature that was
previously only supported by Nvidia’s Turing
GPUs. Meanwhile, Scott Herkelman, vice
president and general manager for Radeon,
has also confirmed on a Reddit thread that
there will be no blower coolers on the
reference models of the new GPUs. That’s a
great move, although we’re still surprised it’s
taken AMD so long to get around to it.
AMD’s first Navi products showed
enormous improvements in bothperformance and power consumption over
AMD’s previous Graphics Core Next chips,
with fast frame rates for the money. However,
the lack of hardware ray tracing puts them at
a disadvantage compared with Nvidia’s
pricier RTX GPUs, making the latter the
natural choice if you want to play games with
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