Radeon RX 6000: ray tracing and DLSS response, AMD is back on standards

Source: HW Upgrade added 04th Nov 2020

  • radeon-rx-6000:-ray-tracing-and-dlss-response,-amd-is-back-on-standards

AMD has confirmed that Radeon GPUs RX 6000 support titles that rely on common APIs such as Microsoft DXR and Vulkan for ray tracing. This means that it will be possible, for example, to activate ray tracing in Control with the new AMD GPUs, but not in Wolfenstein Youngblood which uses a Vulkan extension created by Nvidia.

by Manolo De Agostini published , at 08: 00 in the Video Cards channel

AMD Radeon Ships RDNA

The 28 October AMD pitted a lot of details on video cards Radeon RX 6000 , from the main technical specifications to performance in “traditional” games, ie based on rasterization. The company has kept the confidentiality on the ray tracing and on the one it has renamed Super Resolution , a technology that should respond to Nvidia’s DLSS. We know that AMD’s new RDNA 2 GPUs have specific units to handle the calculations related to ray tracing, called Ray Accelerator, more specifically a unit per Compute Unit. In the hours after the conference, a first brief indication of the capabilities of the Ray Accelerators was leaked, but it is too little to draw definitive conclusions.

There are about a fortnight left before the debut of the new cards – Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT, the RX 6900 XT will arrive on December 8th ?? and AMD plans to reveal more information ahead of launch. The company intends to create some hype, but something has leaked in the meantime: in a brief statement to AdoredTV, AMD confirmed that will support ” all ray tracing titles that use industry standards, including the Microsoft DXR API and future Vulkan API dedicated to ray tracing. Games that use the ray tracing and proprietary extensions will not be supported “.

In the past few days we have sensed that this path will probably also be followed by Intel for future gaming GPUs. AMD’s statement means for example that in games that support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), like Control, it will be possible to activate ray tracing, while in the case of Nvidia RTX implementations – such Quake II RTX or Wolfenstein Youngblood – will not be possible.

It is clear that in the future we will increasingly move towards an implementation based on industrial rather than proprietary standards, on the other hand, Nvidia pushed the concept of ray tracing before the industry moved in that direction. As for the response to DLSS, a fundamental technology for high performance by activating ray tracing, we know that AMD is working on “ Super Resolution “: at the moment it seems that the technology will not be available at launch, but based on Microsoft’s DirectML it will be” open “and” cross platform “, unlike DLSS which necessarily requires an Nvidia GPU.