We already know Sony’s PlayStation 5 will assist real-time ray tracing courtesy of its new customized AMD Navi GPU, and now Microsoft’s next-gen Project Scarlett console has hitched itself to the ray tracing bandwagon as effectively because of, yep, you guessed it, one other customized AMD Navi GPU. Confirmed this night by Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer throughout Microsoft’s E3 press convention, Project Scarlett will ship hardware-accelerated ray tracing to your front room someday subsequent 12 months within the Holiday 2020 season – so why the heck shouldn’t AMD’s desktop Navi playing cards comply with swimsuit, eh?
I’m referring, after all, to the present hearsay mills that proclaim AMD’s next-gen Navi graphics playing cards gained’t assist this 12 months’s hottest new lighting tech. It appears bonkers to me that AMD would guarantee ray tracing assist on consoles however not on PC, so I’m taking this information as just about stable affirmation that we’ll be taking a look at a bunch of ray tracing-enabled Navi playing cards when AMD do their very own large E3 press convention tomorrow on June 10.
Admittedly, Project Scarlett’s AMD {hardware} has been co-designed and co-engineered with Microsoft themselves, so it’s nonetheless attainable there’s some unique Microsoft jiggery-pokery occurring right here that gained’t make its option to PC. I extremely doubt this would be the case, however I assume we’ll positively know for certain in slightly below 24 hours when AMD’s Next Horizon Gaming occasion kicks off at 3pm PT / 11pm BST.
So far, AMD have solely given us a glimpse of a single GPU of their new household of Navi playing cards – the RX 5700. Teased simply a few weeks in the past at AMD’s Computex key observe, the RX 5700 is supposedly 10% sooner than Nvidia’s RTX 2070. That’s all we actually learn about its efficiency proper now, as AMD are leaving the majority of their large Navi reveal till tomorrow’s E3 showcase.
However, one other attention-grabbing tidbit from Microsoft’s Project Scarlett reveal might need simply given us a clue as to what sort of reminiscence Navi will use, as till now all AMD have mentioned on the matter is that Navi could have one thing known as “next generation memory”. Previously, AMD have been very keen on HBM2 reminiscence (or 2nd Gen High Bandwidth Memory), however Microsoft’s new console field goes down the GDDR6 route – which is similar sort of reminiscence discovered on the Nvidia RTX playing cards. That’s to not say that AMD’s Navi playing cards will certainly have GDDR6 reminiscence, however I reckon it’s a fairly excessive risk.
Alas, there’s not a lot else we are able to glean about the way forward for AMD’s Navi GPUs from the remainder of Project Scarlett’s spec, however it certain does paint a promising image of what Navi can do when paired with certainly one of AMD’s new Zen 2 Ryzen CPUs, which additionally sits on the coronary heart of Microsoft’s new console. With potential body charges reaching as excessive as 120fps, supposedly “non-existent loading times” because of a next-gen SSD (which just about actually is a PCIe 4.zero little bit of storage, given the way it’s been AMD’s large calling card for Navi and their new Ryzen 3000 CPUs), plus assist for as much as 8K resolutions, Project Scarlett feels like a very potent and significantly nippy little bit of equipment.
Still gained’t be pretty much as good as a correct PC, although, eh?
See our E3 2019 tag for extra protection from the present. Our Brendy and Matt are on the market in Los Angeles, enjoying games and taking names. They’re additionally assuming the roles of the Cheerer and the Jeerer to liveblog large announcement occasions, hitting EA and Microsoft thus far.
