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Pemalite said:
taus90 said:

Well I think everyone here is making an assumption based on what has been provided by Cerny and how it could be achievable, given the available and upcoming tech for PC's. Sure Navi is based on GCN and it will be probably Navi 10 also AMD's focus with Navi was to fix GCN previous shortcoming and make it more efficient. Yet We don't know anything what Navi has to offer and many reports suggest Navi will have an answer Nvidia RTX, whether Raytracing support is achieved by asynchronous compute or has an dedicated Hardware remains to be seen 7/7

Graphics Core Next is efficient. It's just not efficient at gaming, it's a very compute centric design... And because of such only shows it's true potential when backed with inordinate amounts of memory bandwidth to keep everything fed... Which is where Asynchronous compute came into play.

Navi is likely to be a Polaris replacement... A Mid-Range part, but implement some of the newer tricks found in Vega like Draw Stream Binning Rasterization, Primitive Shaders and so on. (And probably make them work the majority of the time!). - It will also likely see the bulk of it's performance gains with a re-balancing of the functional units to achieve more throughput in gaming orientated workloads and a couple of new tricks. But it's still Graphics Core Next with all it's Pro's and many many many Con's.

I doubt AMD will take the approach nVidia has with Ray Tracing and include components specifically for that task (RT Cores) that cost transistors, rather they will do what they have historically done and rework their shader pipelines to make them more effective with those tasks...
Remember we have been down a similar path before... nVidia with the Geforce FX/5 spent a ton of transistors on retaining fixed-function hardware like TnL, whilst AMD with the Radeon 9700 series spent it's transistor budget on more general-purpose hardware... And well. The rest is history.

Vega 7 for instance is able to do 1 Gigarays compared to the Geforce RTX 2080 8.

And in Claybook Vega 64 is doing 9.76 Gigarays which is a pretty impressive feat.

So I think AMD will leverage GCN's inherent compute strengths and simply make it more flexible to lend itself better to Ray Tracing. But that's an assertion at this point, I don't think AMD has the turn-around time to bake dedicated Ray Tracing hardware into it's GPU's on such a short notice, maybe with it's Next-Gen hardware.

Thats the point even going by the GCN specs we can speculate what will be the performance limitation for NAVI, but still a huge part of the development for Navi is still unknown the only leak I can find on the internet regarding the development is that AMD was looking to improve Geometry engine, which has been problematic area for GCN. 

And I don't remember the article or the year but it was i think 2018 interview where AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed that more than half of the staff from RTG were redirected from Vega on to improving Navi and that it was particularly being designed for Sony, It could be a possibility that Sony might have jumped in mid Navi development and suggested some changes of their own (IBM,Cell) , Now what those changes or secret sauce could be is completely unknown.

P.S. Wont be Surprised if Ps5 makes an appearance at Navi Reveal on July 7