THE OTHER GUYS

OK, Nvidia has been hogging all the limelight so far, but let’s not forget AMD. It has its own ray-tracing engine, called Radeon Rays, “high-efficiency, high-performance GPU-accelerated ray-tracing software.” AMD is taking a slightly different approach to Nvidia, concentrating on ground-up software support. Radeon Rays is open source, based around OpenCL, and as such is platform and OS independent. We’ve yet to see Radeon Rays in a game, but it has quietly been gathering support; importantly, it is due to be integrated into Unity’s GPU Progressive Lightmapper, a hugely influential game engine.

The next question is: Does AMD have a hardware response to the RTX series? Nvidia has the edge in performance, but that doesn’t equate to profit. Radeon cards have carved out a large chunk of the sub-$300 market, which shift in real numbers. The Navi GPU architecture is in the wings, and rumor has it that AMD will want to keep prices keen ($130 for an RX 3060, through to $250 for an RX 3080, if one popularly quoted leak is to be believed). However, it looks like hardware ray tracing is off the menu for now (unless AMD is being very tightlipped). But at its heart, ray tracing, and path tracing, is all math, and scales beautifully with multiple GPUs, so you can keep things simple if you wish.

It may be a smart move to let Nvidia take the early hits in getting hardware ray tracing going. The architecture after Navi will be the one to watch if AMD plans to jump aboard this particular wagon. Until then, it appears content to build software support, especially for its professional ProRender technology, and concentrate on delivering a competitive level of performance per dollar in its cards. Real-time ray tracing is still very much a novelty, and few have the hardware to use it. A fast rasterization engine is what the mainstream market is going to be shopping for, for a while yet.