AMD Navi 20 GPU Allegedly Supports Ray Tracing and Enhanced GCN

Skanky Sylveon · March 28, 2019

https://wccftech.com/amd-navi-20-radeon-rx-graphics-card-ray-tracing-gcn-architecture-rumor/amp/

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AMD Navi 20 GPU To Be Featured on Enthusiast Grade Gaming Graphics Cards, Features Enhanced GCN Architecture and Ray Tracing Performance Equivalent or Faster Than an RTX 2080 Ti

First off, this is a rumor, so take it with a grain of salt, but if it's true, it would be a very good thing. Nvidia's RTX GPUs are a bit overpriced in my opinion, and a healthy dose of competition may help reduce prices.

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So starting off with the Navi 20 details, we first have the alleged Ray Tracing support and to be honest, I think it’s very likely that AMD would introduce their own take on Ray Tracing, especially when Crytek recently demoed their first ray tracing demo based on their CRYENGINE on an AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics card. AMD would like to support Microsoft’s DXR API and provide a more open-source ray tracing feature support as they have done so with many other technologies in the past, e.g. TressFX, Freesync, OpenCL.

I think that's important to note. If AMD comes out with a GPU that supports their own implementation of real time ray tracing, it probably won't be Nvidia's implementation. Which makes sense, Nvidia has a track record of not wanting to share their technology.

Just in case anyone that sees this doesn't know about the Crytek real time raytracing demo, here it is.

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But we have to take into consideration that AMD’s Navi 20 GPUs will be launching a year after the Navi 10 mainstream parts. So that puts the launch to around 2020 which is still pretty far away. At the same time, NVIDIA states that they don’t have any plans to rush to 7nmright now as they can achieve much competitive performance to watt figures on 12nm FinFET process so it’s possible that NVIDIA could be aiming for the enhanced 7nm+ or 5nm node, completely excluding the 7nm process off their tables.

That's something to keep in mind though. Nvidia may have something a decent amount more powerful a year from Navi 10's release, so even if it performs better then the 2080ti, that might not mean that it outperforms Nvidia's current flagship at the time. Still, if it's not that far off from Nvidia's current flagship, it may keep their prices from being too unreasonable.