AMD showcases RDNA2 raytracing with demo video

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Raytracing has been taking the gaming industry by storm recently; from creating buzz around GPUs that support it, to using it in old games, to console implementation, it’s no secret that raytracing is big and is by far the biggest advancement in graphical fidelity for video games in a long time. But there’s been a significant gap in the market that AMD has yet to fill when their next generation graphics cards are released later this year.

Nvidia managed to get a headstart when they released their RTX cards back in 2018, and since then AMD have been trying desperately to catch up with their fanbase eagerly anticipating AMD’s launch of the Big Navi cards. Now, AMD have released their own demo showcasing the raytracing capabilities of their RDNA2 structure:

I can imagine your first thought was “man, people really like mirrors in the future”, which certainly seems to be the case in the demo as almost every surface is reflective. Granted it’s kind of the point of the demo, as all those reflections were being rendered in real-time. Smudges would be a real pain though, I’d feel like I would constantly have to wipe each surface with a lens cloth, no wonder everyone’s a robot in this world.

But what strikes me as odd is the framerate, we all saw it, in fact we all felt it I’m sure. The video itself seems to be running at ~30fps, clearly raytracing is taxing on performance, but why AMD didn’t tone it down to keep it running at a higher framerate is strange to me. One argument could be that they’re showing off the worst case scenario, and that most games won’t have nearly as many reflective surfaces. But judging by how many people have already commented on it, I’m not sure this is reflecting well on AMD’s attempt at their raytracing performance…

What do you think of the demo? Does the future look bright (and shiny) for AMD? Or have you lost hope in AMD? Let us know yout thoughts!