Rdna2 will support ray tracing and variable rate shading by hardware

Yesterday's announcement by Microsoft about the Xbox X series shed some light on what AMD will bring to the table with its next-generation RDNA2 architecture. Today's Navi GPUs use a 7nm RDNA architecture, and the company has named the RDNA2 successor in its roadmaps.

RDNA2 will support Ray Tracing and Variable rate shading

We now know that at least some variants of RDNA 2-based GPUs will be compatible with Ray Tracing. In addition, we also learned that variable rate shading technology will be a feature of the architecture. Both features are already supported by NVIDIA's Turing architecture.

Ray Tracing and variable rate shading will be the focal points of the RDNA2 graphics architecture design, bringing to life the next generation of AMD GPUs. Microsoft's revelation of its Xbox Series X console attributed both features to AMD's “next generation RDNA” architecture (which is logically RDNA2).

As we know, the new Microsoft console will use a semi-custom SoC using an AMD CPU and GPU, and the latter will use a completely new RDNA2 architecture. Based on it, the new console and the next graphics cards will be able to make use of Ray Tracing accelerated by hardware and technologies such as variable rate shading.

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We will possibly see the first RDNA2 graphics cards in the second half of 2020. We will keep you informed.

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