AMD Radeon Navi 20 GPU Might Support Raytracing

As per YouTube channel, RedTechGaming, AMD is looking to take on NVIDIA in the highest segment of the GPU market the coming year with a supercharged Navi chip. And I mean a card that’ll challenge the Turing flagship, the RTX 2080 Ti. Yeah, I know it sounds a bit hard to believe given AMD’s recent performance in the consumer graphics card market, but what’s wrong with wishful thinking? Absolutely nothing!

We already know that after the reveal of the Zen2 based Ryzen 3000 processors in the latter half of Q2 this year, AMD will try to retake the mid-range GPU segment with the launch of the much purported Navi 10 GPUs. Expect aggressive pricing and notable performance gains compared to Polaris. The power draw and heat dissipation should also improve thanks to the efficiency of TMSC’s 7nm node.

Navi 10 Will Succeed Polaris

AMD’s Navi 10 lineup should go head-to-head against NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and the RTX 2060, with another possible SKU that offers performance slightly lower than the 2070, but at a much lower price. That’s what history has taught us. NVIDIA tends to come up with the absolute fastest chips but also charges a premium for them. AMD, on the other hand, makes some compromises here and there, but their offerings are competitive regardless, just at a relatively lower price.

Why AMD’s Navi GPUs Won’t Impress Gamers or Enthusiasts Alike

Today’s report from the rumor-mill, however, doesn’t concern the Radeon Navi 10, but its bigger, beefier brother, the Navi 20. RedTechGaming which weirdly has the same initials as Radeon Technology Group (RTG) yesterday claimed in a video that AMD is prepping the Navi 20 GPUs for a 2020 release window. And guess what? Other than being direct competitors to NVIDIA’s Turing big boys, the channel claims that it will also incorporate some major architectural changes in order to support raytracing.

Navi 20 to go After the NVIDIA Turing Flaship?

As per RTG, their source has already reported impressive results from the Navi 20, both in terms of performance as well as raytracing. Now, the first part I’m inclined to believe, but the latter, nah. AMD has repeatedly made it clear that they’ll support raytracing only after its adoption is more widespread and when it advances to a level wherein their mid-range GPUs can also utilize it.

However, there might be a possibility that AMD will leverage DXR’s fallback routine to implement raytracing just like Crytek did recently, which urged NVIDIA to announce raytracing support for all the Pascal and Turing GTX cards. None of the GTX cards have RTCores to accelerate raytracing nor the Tensor cores to upscale the image, but I reckon they should be able to render playable FPS at sub 4K resolutions using a mixture of medium-high settings.

Read more:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX Graphics Cards’ Prices Drop First Time Since Launch