Although there are no games yet available that support the pseudo-ray tracing technology that Nvidia's RTX-series Turing graphics cards support, Nvidia is currently the only company that offers any hardware that can support it. AMD doesn't have anything like that, at least, not available for consumers. It launched a ray tracing demo for its ProRender engine earlier this year and it looks pretty damn good.
As for games though, there's nothing out there that's set to use AMD's Vulkan-driven ray tracing technology. AMD likes it that way too, because as far as it's concerned, there's no point unless everyone can enjoy it with affordable GPUs, which Nvidia's new RTX cards are certainly not.
In a translated 4gamer.net chat with David Wang, the Radeon Technology Group’s SVP of engineering (via PCGamesN), Wang claims that "AMD will definitely respond to DirectX Raytracing," he says. "For the moment we will focus on promoting the speed-up of offline CG production environments centered on AMD’s Radeon ProRender, which is offered free of charge"
"Utilisation of ray tracing games will not proceed unless we can offer ray tracing in all product ranges from low end to high end."
This is arguably a pretty smart move from AMD, as there are a lot of stumbling blocks in the way of Nvidia's own ray tracing goals. Firstly, its new cards that support it cost upwards of $500 at a minimum. Secondly, even the 2080 Ti, which costs $1,200 in some cases, can't render ray tracing in games at anything above 1080P without framerates disintegrating. Thirdly, the Windows update that will make it possible isn't even out yet, and fourthly, there are no supporting games yet.
That's nearly two months since the cards were released with no games and no way to enjoy ray tracing outside of tech demos.
Maybe AMD is on to something.
