AMD to support all ray tracing titles that do not feature proprietary APIs
As promised, AMD is slowly uncovering the details on its ray tracing implementation on Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. Today a short statement from AMD was published by AdoredTV , where the manufacturer confirmed it will support ray tracing in all games that do not come with proprietary APIs (such as NVIDIA DirectX RTX or NVIDIA Vulkan RTX).
AMD will support all ray tracing titles using industry-based standards, including the Microsoft DXR API and the upcoming Vulkan raytracing API. Games making of use of proprietary raytracing APIs and extensions will not be supported.
— AMD Marketing
AMD has made a commitment to stick to industry standards, such as Microsoft DXR or Vulkan ray tracing APIs. Both should slowly become more popular, as the focus goes away from NVIDIA’s implementation. After all, Intel will support DirectX DXR as well, so developers will have even less reason to focus on NVIDIA’s implementation.
What the statement from AMD means is that at launch Radeon RX 6000 series will support all games that already have DirectX Raytracing (DXR) support, such as Control, but games that only support NVIDIA RTX will not be supported (Quake II RTX or Wolfenstein Youngblood).
AMD is set to launch its Radeon RX 6000 series on November 18th (6800XT and 6800). The top SKU called RX 6900X will be released on December 8th. AMD Big Navi GPU features a new type of core called Ray Accelerator. The number of RAs depends on the number of Compute Units (each has one Ray Accelerator).
| AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Specifications | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| VideoCardz | Radeon RX 6900XT | Radeon RX 6800XT | Radeon RX 6800 |
| Picture |  | |  |
| GPU | Navi 21 XTX | Navi 21 XT | Navi 21 XL |
| Compute Units | 80 | 72 | 60 |
| Stream Processors | 5120 | 4608 | 3840 |
| Ray Accelerators | 80 | 72 | 60 |
| Texture Units | 320 | 288 | 240 |
| ROPs | 128 | 128 | 96 |
| Game Clock | 2015 MHz | 2015 MHz | 1815 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 2250 MHz | 2250 MHz | 2105 MHz |
| Memory | 16GB G6 | 16GB G6 | 16GB G6 |
| Infinity Cache | 128 MB | 128 MB | 128 MB |
| Memory Clock | 16 Gbps | 16 Gbps | 16 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 512 GB/s | 512 GB/s | 512 GB/s |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Total Board Power | 300W | 300W | 250W |
| MSRP | 999 USD | 649 USD | 579 USD |
| Release Date | December 8 | November 18 | November 18 |
Source: AdoredTV , Overclock3D