AMD Radeon RX 6000 series to support games with Microsoft DXR and Vulkan ray tracing APIs

AMD to support all ray tracing titles that do not feature proprietary APIs

As promised, AMD is slowly uncovering the details on its ray tracing implementation on Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. Today a short statement from AMD was published by AdoredTV, where the manufacturer confirmed it will support ray tracing in all games that do not come with proprietary APIs (such as NVIDIA DirectX RTX or NVIDIA Vulkan RTX).

AMD will support all ray tracing titles using industry-based standards, including the Microsoft DXR API and the upcoming Vulkan raytracing API. Games making of use of proprietary raytracing APIs and extensions will not be supported.
— AMD Marketing

AMD has made a commitment to stick to industry standards, such as Microsoft DXR or Vulkan ray tracing APIs. Both should slowly become more popular, as the focus goes away from NVIDIA’s implementation. After all, Intel will support DirectX DXR as well, so developers will have even less reason to focus on NVIDIA’s implementation.

What the statement from AMD means is that at launch Radeon RX 6000 series will support all games that already have DirectX Raytracing (DXR) support, such as Control, but games that only support NVIDIA RTX will not be supported (Quake II RTX or Wolfenstein Youngblood).

AMD is set to launch its Radeon RX 6000 series on November 18th (6800XT and 6800). The top SKU called RX 6900X will be released on December 8th. AMD Big Navi GPU features a new type of core called Ray Accelerator. The number of RAs depends on the number of Compute Units (each has one Ray Accelerator).

AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Specifications
VideoCardz	Radeon RX 6900XT	Radeon RX 6800XT	Radeon RX 6800
Picture
GPU	Navi 21 XTX	Navi 21 XT	Navi 21 XL
Compute Units	80	72	60
Stream Processors	5120	4608	3840
Ray Accelerators	80	72	60
Texture Units	320	288	240
ROPs	128	128	96
Game Clock	2015 MHz	2015 MHz	1815 MHz
Boost Clock	2250 MHz	2250 MHz	2105 MHz
Memory	16GB G6	16GB G6	16GB G6
Infinity Cache	128 MB	128 MB	128 MB
Memory Clock	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s
Memory Bus	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Total Board Power	300W	300W	250W
MSRP	999 USD	649 USD	579 USD
Release Date	December 8	November 18	November 18

Source: AdoredTV, Overclock3D