Last week, when AMD announced their RDNA2 based RX 6000 series graphics cards, many (myself included) were disappointed with their lack of information about ray tracing. The company did announce that RX 6000 series will support hardware accelerated ray tracing using Microsoft’s DirectX 12 ray tracing API known as DXR, and showed off a demo reel of upcoming titles which will include ray tracing support such as Godfall and Dirt 5. However, the company fell short of providing actual performance numbers, and was unclear about whether or not these new graphics cards would support the existing library of games which utilize DXR ray tracing.
We reached out to AMD for clarification and received the following response:
AMD will support all ray tracing titles using industry-based standards, including the Microsoft DXR API and the upcoming Vulkan raytracing API. Games making of use of proprietary raytracing APIs and extensions will not be supported.
AMD Marketing
What this means is that existing DXR-supported titles are supported, as well as titles which will utilize the official Vulkan ray tracing API. However, titles such as Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Quake II RTX may not be supported as those use non-standard, proprietary API extensions.
We’re still waiting to hear more about ray-tracing performance, but this is good news nonetheless as it at least clears up some of the ambiguity around AMD’s hardware accelerated ray tracing implementation.
