AMD Drops Hint About Future Microsoft DXR Ray Tracing Support On Radeon

When NVIDIA unveiled its GeForce Turing series, many began to wonder what its special RTX features meant for the competition. On the pro side, RTX allows designers to take advantage of things like accelerated ray tracing and deep-learning assisted denoising, and on the gaming side, it allows scaled-back real-time ray tracing in supported games, and post-processing techniques such as deep-learning super-sampling anti-aliasing (among other things).

The benefits offered by both the Tensor and RT cores on RTX can be immense in supported workloads. With tensors, AI denoising can be accelerated, and with the RT cores, real-time ray tracing can be taken advantage of (with obvious bias to keep the performance up to acceptable levels). It all sounds good, but where does that leave AMD?

As it happens, AMD is planning to deliver a solution that will take advantage of Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing feature DXR. This was revealed by SVP of Engineering at AMD, David Wang. While the original comment was written in Japanese, it’s not hard to understand a translated “AMD will definitely respond to DXR”. techPowerUp reports that the company is currently working on improving its CG capabilities in ProRender, which mirrors what I gathered from the company’s showing at SIGGRAPH a few months ago.

ProRender is an interesting mention here. AMD might seem really behind the curve with NVIDIA already having products to market that accelerate these workloads, but the company already has a ton of experience with rendering, and let’s not ignore the fact that the company hasn’t made it a habit to cripple half-precision performance as NVIDIA has on its GPUs. Many Radeons are already able to enjoy workloads accelerated by half-precision, such as deep-learning (as a direct example, Vega 64 is 25 TFLOPS FP16; GTX 1080 Ti is 0.18 TFLOPS). Whether its work in ProRender can be transferred over to DXR, we’ll have to wait and see.

AMD does have one thing on its side, at least potentially. DXR games are still not on the market, and nor is the Windows build that enables full support (thanks to 1809 being pulled after its release, to be replaced later this month.) Even if DXR games get here tomorrow, initial reports hint at the performance hit being quite extreme with ray tracing enabled, with the 2080 Ti said to deliver about 1080/60. There’s absolutely no guarantee that this performance information is correct, but it’s not hard to believe.

That would make it seem like ray tracing has a lot of room to grow, and it will. We’re only in gen-one, seriously early days, so hopefully by the time AMD gets a product out the door, the ecosystem will have much richer support.