DirectX Raytracing (DXR) Support to AMD GPUs Coming Soon, Similar FPS Hit As GeForce GTX Expected

With the launch of the Radeon RX 5700 series, AMD has solidified itself as a formidable competitor to NVIDIA in the mid-range GPU market, as both their cards offer similar performance to the Super series RTX parts, but at lower prices. Despite that, though, many people still opt to go with Nvidia’s cards, largely due to one factor: support for ray-tracing otherwise known as RTX or DXR. But, AMD is looking to change that soon as according to reports, they will be enabling support for it in their upcoming drivers.

Before you read this and go out to buy your new AMD card though, keep in mind that while AMD is enabling DXR support, none of their offerings have hardware-level support for ray tracing, unlike NVIDIA’s Turing RTX line-up. Thus, the workload will fall on to the shaders, heavily impacting gaming performance similar to the GTX 10-series and 16-series GPUs.

This means that if you are in the market for a card that offers ray tracing while performing adequately in games, NVIDIA’s RTX cards are still the only option for you. However, this is still a step in the right direction for AMD and we hope to see dedicated ray-tracing hardware in their next-gen Navi GPUs.

Further Reading:

• AMD Joins Intel Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium Expected to Replace PCIe…Eventually
• MSI To Launch 8 Different Radeon 5700 Series Cards In August

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