arlier last month, there were several reports from media outlets detailing that "Ray Tracing is exclusive to Nvidia RTX video cards" those reports ended up being misleading.
Earlier yesterday WCCFTech sat down with Brian Burke, NVIDIA PR Gaming Technology, Esports & Consumer VR and gave clarification over what games actually use their exclusive proprietary Vulkan Based Ray Tracing Technology.
The vast majority of games released with ray tracing support use the industry standard Microsoft DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) API. Three exceptions we are aware of include Quake II RTX, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and JX3, which use NVIDIA ray tracing extensions for Vulkan.
Towards the end of the interview a very important question was asked in what CD Projekt Red plans to use for Cyberpunk 2077 since recent reports were that it was exclusive to "Nvidia video cards"
I have seen stories that say that Cyberpunk 2077 ray tracing will only work on NVIDIA GPUs. Why is that?
Brian: Cyberpunk 2077 uses the industry standard DirectX Ray Tracing API. It will work on any DXR-compatible GPU. Nothing related to Cyberpunk 2077 ray tracing is proprietary to NVIDIA.
There it is folks, our confirmation that Ray Tracing will be coming to AMD RX 6000 series cards and potentially next gen consoles. So fret not if you can't get your hands on a NVIDIA 3000 Series RTX GPU. Cyberpunk 2077 only works on DirectX 12 Ultimate — previously, CD Projekt RED explained that it chose this API for two reasons: it is a standard API for Xbox consoles, and ray tracing started with it.
This also means that the Ray Tracing may appear on the PS5 with the Xbox Series, the only question is optimization. On PC, the game supports four ray tracing effects at once.
- Ray-traced Ambient Occlusion
- Ray-traced Diffuse Illumination
- Ray-traced Reflections
- Ray-traced Shadows
How many of these effects will be utilized on next gen consoles when the "Next Gen" update hits the new consoles in early 2021 are currently unknown for the time being. Hopefully we will be given a date sometime shortly after the release of the game next month.
