Xbox Series X Ray Tracing Demos, Big Navi Radeon Unveil Rumored For AMD Analyst Day
According to the redditor, Microsoft will be on hand at the AMD event, which will take place on March 5th. There's a lot to digest here, but we'll start off first with the RDNA 2-based Radeon GPU that will be inside the game console. This rumor alleges that the RNDA 2 architecture will be exclusive to Microsoft and the Xbox Series X, seemingly leaving the Sony PlayStation 5 completely out of the equation. In addition, it's said that AMD's implementation of hardware-based raytracing is 30 to 50 percent more efficient than what's currently possible with NVIDIA's first-generation GeForce RTX graphics cards.
There will reportedly be at least a few game demos on display to show off raytraced lighting effects and reflections in an unnamed racing game from Turn 10 Studios. Variable Rate Shading support is coming to Forza Horizon 4, in part to aid in motion blur effects. The game is said to be able to run 4K resolution at a staggering 120fps on Xbox Series X hardware.
Another rather interesting nugget of information gleaned from this rumor is that AMD and Microsoft are working tougher on extended cloud-based computing features for both the Xbox Series X and the xCloud game streaming service. Similar in concept to how NVIDIA has added raytracing support with GeForce NOW thanks to cloud-based GeForce RTX hardware, Microsoft will be delivering Azure raytracing powered by RDNA 2 hardware. It should be noted, however that this functionality is coming further down the road.
A live demonstration of a forest at the Financial Analyst Day is said to give us a look at live raytraced effects being delivered over an internet connection via Azure. "It's the most mind blowingly realistic forest you have ever seen. Just a camera pan through it, switching between local raytracing and Azure raytracing," writes throwaway03052020. "The difference is staggering. Different seasons. Snow is forming, the deep sun is shining through every single snowflake on screen, casting diffuse shadows. Snow melts, forming puddles and streams, all lighted with a precision that was impossible until now."
All of this information should be taken with a big grain of salt at this moment -- especially the notion that RDNA 2 will be limited to just the Xbox Series X. However, the rest seems pretty plausible given what we already know about the game console's hardware and what's currently possible with cloud-based game streaming solutions.
With that being said, throwaway03052020 has one other bombshell that could be revealed this week. It's suggested that AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su could announce the graphics card that we've all been hearing about and waiting for: Radeon "Big Navi". According to this rumor, Big Navi will be the flagship of a 3-GPU family and will deliver in excess of 18 TFLOPs compute performance.
That's a lot of salt to swallow at one time, so we'll just take a moment to pause. Some of this information seems a little bit too good to be true, but we'll find out for sure on March 5th. So, stay tuned if more details leak out in the coming days.
