A bit of an interesting article when it comes to Series X and ray tracing since it's related to RDNA 2.0
It seems that Microsoft is less than enthused about the prospect of ray tracing in the Xbox Series X, despite it being deemed the 'ultimate in realism.' In a Hot Chips deep dive on the AMD-powered GPU at the heart of the next-gen console, Mark Grossman, principal architect at Microsoft, has detailed the graphics silicon inside the Series X and just what role ray tracing has in it.
The short answer seems to be: not much.
The dual compute units (DCU) of the Big Navi-like GPU inside the Xbox Series X do have specific hardware dedicated to accelerating the real-time ray tracing process. But that seems to be the only change to the RDNA 2.0 dual compute unit compared with the first-gen ones found in the AMD RX 5700-series cards.
"The overall ray tracing speed up varies a lot, but for this task it can be up to 10x the performance of a pure shader-based implementation."
"We do support DirectX Raytracing acceleration, for the ultimate in realism™, but in this generation developers still want to use traditional rendering techniques, developed over decades, without a performance penalty," says Grossman sadly. "They can apply ray tracing selectively, where materials and environments demand, so we wanted a good balance of die resources dedicated to the two techniques."
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Of course, those are pretty vague statements but it will be interesting to see how RDNA 2 performs
Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 19 August 2020
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