When the system requirements of Cyberpunk 2077 are announced, the Radeon graphics cards from AMD naturally play a role for the standard settings Role. If you look at the system requirements for ray tracing, only graphics cards with NVIDIA GPU are listed here.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a title that is being supported by NVIDIA in development. But of course you can ask yourself why the developers do not recommend any Radeon hardware with ray tracing when Big Navi has the ray tracing accelerator and has already proven in the tests that the two cards are quite appealing, depending on the game Offer performance.

According to the developers, there will be a patch for Radeon 6000 graphics cards that will also activate ray tracing. Buyer or owner of a Radeon RX 6800, Radeon RX 6800 XT and from the beginning of December also a Radeon RX 6900 XT will start on 10. December, however, came out empty The developers cite the lack of necessary optimization for the RDNA-2 architecture as the reason for the lack of support.

Also for the new consoles Playstation 5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, these should not be added until later, although this was known for a little longer. It’s a bit surprising that the new Radeon cards are being completely excluded for the time being.

Raytracing via DXR is not proprietary

Of course, there are once again calls that NVIDIA has created a proprietary interface and is now throwing obstacles in the way of AMD. It is not so. From the very beginning, NVIDIA has an interface developed by Microsoft called DXR as part of DirectX 12 and now DirectX 12 Ultimate addressed, or a hardware acceleration of the calculations implemented. Only VulkanRT, as it is used in Wolfenstein: Young Blood or QuakeRTX, is not yet part of a standard and thus an extension that has not been implemented by every manufacturer.

All games, which Address Microsoft’s DXR interfaces, worked in our tests with the Big Navi cards. However, here and there either major performance problems occur or individual effects are not yet displayed, which is more of an error / bug than an intentional omission.

A few in particular are noticeable Bugs and Watch Dogs Legion and Deliver us the Moon, where raytracing effects are calculated but not displayed. So the performance is what you would expect with ray tracing, but it is missing in the display. Basically, the Big Navi cards based on the RDNA-2 architecture apparently offer raytracing performance that should be roughly on par with NVIDIA’s Turing and Ampere GPUs. Due to a lack of optimizations, games like Battlefield V and Control don’t run that well.

For Cyberpunk 2077, the lack of optimizations means that Players first have to do without the ray tracing effects. A chicane intended by NVIDIA cannot be derived from this.