There’s no doubt that AMD was late to the ray tracing race. NVIDIA struck first with GeForce RTX 20, the generation of graphics cards that arrived in 2018 and which was the first to have dedicated hardware to accelerate ray tracing, the popular RT cores.

These first generation RT cores freed the GPU from the most important calculations related to ray tracing, such as the intersections of triangle rays and box boundariesbut it is true that, despite everything, this technology is so demanding that the loss of performance was evident and there was nothing left but to compensate it with scaling and intelligent image reconstruction technologies.

The graphics cards that rivaled the GeForce RTX 20 were Radeon RX 5000s and had no dedicated hardware, so they didn’t accelerate AI or ray tracing. AMD first implemented hardware ray tracing acceleration with the Radeon RX 6000, but used an architecture that ultimately underperformed on GeForce RTX 20 working with said technology and that they arrived a generation later.

NVIDIA clearly won in ray tracing and moved further than AMD with the GeForce RTX 30, which represented a significant leap with 2nd generation RT cores and optimizations introduced by those in green.

With Radeon RX 7000 on AMD Significantly improved ray tracing performance, especially on a high scale, but the company is aware that it still has a long way to go, and great room for improvement.

Scott Herkelman, head of AMD’s Radeon division, confirmed this fact and said that they take ray tracing into account when pricing their graphics cards. He also explained that he knows that the Radeon RX 7000 has lower ray tracing performance than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and that therefore, the Radeon RX 7800 XT is priced lower than its direct rival, the GeForce RTX 4070.

The executive too is committed to improving the ray tracing performance of Radeon graphics cards with upcoming architectures. It will be interesting to see how AMD develops in this regard and also how it will stand when Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty and Alan Wake 2 are released, two games that will be big exponents of next-gen ray tracing.

Still, it’s clear that with DLSS 3.5, which introduces AI lightning reconstruction, NVIDIA has taken another important step forward that has pushed it even further away from AMD and the Sunnyvale giant pulling raw power is not enoughyou have to move on if you want to catch up with the green giant.