“Ray tracing an important technique”

The graphics card year 2018 has been an unusual roller coaster. It started with skyrocketing prices as a result miningboom and no interesting news in sight until the autumn, when Nvidia launched the Geforce RTX series and strengthened its position on the performance throne.

The big news with graphics cards was not higher overall performance in standard rasterization, but support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing in real time. This was followed shortly afterwards by DirectX Raytracing (DXR) and the first game with technology support – Battlefield V.

As it relates to ray tracing in particular I think it’s an important technology, but as with all important technologies it takes time to really have the ecosystem adopt [it]. And we’re working very closely with the ecosystem on both hardware and software solutions and expect that ray tracing will be an important element especially as it gets more into the mainstream, frankly, of the market.

During Credit Suisse’s annual TMT conference (Technology, Media & Telecom), AMD’s CEO Lisa Su commented on Nvidia’s new venture. According to her, ray tracing an important technology, but which, like other new technologies, needs time to be picked up by the ecosystem.

At the same time, Lisa Su adds that AMD works with players in both hardware and software ray tracing, which she believes is becoming increasingly important as graphics cards with support for technology find their way into lower price ranges. A similar statement was made by AMD’s graphics director David Wang in November, when he said that it will be a while before the technology takes effect and at the same time confirmed that they will oppose Nvidia’s investment.

We believe, we will be very competitive overall and that includes the high-end of the GPU market. Obviously there are new products out there from our competition. We will have our set of new products as well and we will be right there in the mix.

When it comes to the company’s Radeon series of graphics cards, Lisa Su expects AMD to be “very competitive” in 2019, when architecture Navi enters the scene. This should also apply to the upper performance segment, which is contrary to previous information that AMD, like Polaris, exclusively targets the middle segment.

AMD’s architecture Navi is expected to be the first among 7-nanometer consumer graphics cards from TSMC. For a long time there has been talk that Navi will be the very last generation to be based on the almost 7-year-old architecture Graphics Core Next (GCN), but during the autumn it has started to be teased and tossed that it can be a completely new creation.

Apart from the choice of manufacturing technology, very little is known about Navi, including whether it will introduce support for Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing or whether it will have to wait until the year 2020 when the next generation enters the scene.

Source: Wccftech (transcription)

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