AMD's next-gen Navi GPU confirmed to support ray tracing

It was barely 48 hours ago that I exclusively reported that AMD would be unveiling its next-gen Navi GPU architecture at E3 2019 but now we know one thing is for sure: Navi supports ray tracing.

The news is coming directly from PlayStation architect Mark Cerny, who confirmed during an interview with Wired that the PlayStation 5 will have a custom Radeon Navi GPU inside and it will have support for ray tracing. The ray tracing side of the PS5 wouldn't just be limited to graphics either, as Sony will be doing other things with it.

Cerny said that ray tracing goes "beyond graphic implications" say Wired, with Cerny adding: "If you wanted to run tests to see if the player can hear certain audio sources or if the enemies can hear the players' footsteps, ray tracing is useful for that. It's all the same thing as taking a ray through the environment".

So we can expect some interesting things from the ray tracing side of Navi if the tease of what Sony is doing with Navi in the PS5 is anything to go by. It is, however, no surprise that Sony is talking about the PS5 and the Navi GPU architecture supporting ray tracing considering Sony worked directly with the engineers at RTG on the Navi GPU.

What we know now is that Navi definitely has support for ray tracing in console form, so one can expect the Radeon Navi graphics card (or whatever AMD names it) will have ray tracing support on the PC. This really is an exciting time, as we're finding out GPU architectural details about AMD's next-generation graphics architecture, from Sony.

We're less than 6 weeks out from Computex 2019 and just under two months away from E3 2019 where we will know much more about Navi from AMD. For now: ray tracing support is fully confirmed within the Navi GPU architecture.