AMD RDNA2 has ray tracing and variable-rate shading

Yesterday's Xbox Series X announcement from Microsoft sheds some light on what AMD will bring to the table with its next-generation RDNA architecture. The current Navi GPUs use a 7nm RDNA architecture and the company has named the successor RDNA 2 in its roadmaps.

We now know that at least some variants of the RDNA 2 based GPUs will feature ray tracing support. Additionally, we also learned the variable rate shading will be a feature of the architecture. Both of these features are already supported by NVIDIA's Turing architecture.

Variable-rate shading (VRS) is an API-level feature that lets GPUs conserve resources by shading certain areas of a scene at a lower rate than the other, without perceptible difference to the viewer. Microsoft developed two tiers of VRS for its DirectX 12 API, tier-1 is currently supported by NVIDIA "Turing" and Intel Gen11 architectures, while tier-2 is supported by "Turing." The current RDNA architecture doesn't support either tiers. Hardware-accelerated ray-tracing is the cornerstone of NVIDIA's "Turing" RTX 20-series graphics cards, and AMD is catching up to it. Microsoft already standardized it on the software-side with the DXR (DirectX Raytracing) API.

Via: TPU