AMD is working on it. She didn't mention it on stage though. She says they'll have more to announce on RT later in the year. Citation below. Take of it as you will, but this pretty much reinforces for me that we'll be seeing hybrid ray tracing on next gen consoles. I'm leaning on MS here as we saw them on stage and large parts of DX12 is made with GCN architecture in mind, but i hope PS5 has it too. Machine Learning reinforces the entire azure business model. The whole industry moving towards machine learning for animation, AI up-res, etc, are all profitable for MS. Storage, processing, and data collection is their main business. The idea that next generation consoles can run AI models very quickly means there's opportunity for them to look at their current 360BC program, and for X2, run AI-up-resolution on textures and resolution. Third party companies will focus on content creation and leveraging AI to do all the modelling work so that studios only need to buy the service, much cheaper than constantly hiring tons and tons of animators and artists. All of it being processed of course on Azure, and a whole industry of content creation on Azure is where the big money for them will be.
We already know that AMD is a big part of Azure. We know the next Scarlett SoCs have some Azure links in them. We only need to bring this picture together and see how MS profits or maximizes the cost efficiency from all of this, and stop looking at it from a 'trying to beat' their competitors. They're trying to take home money and lots of it, hard to see MS pass up such an opportunity.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3332205/amd/amd-ceo-lisa-su-interview-ryzen-raytracing-radeon.html
“I think ray tracing is an important technology, and it’s something we’re working on as well, both from a hardware and software standpoint,” Su said. “The most important thing, and that’s why we talk so much about the development community, is
technology for technology’s sake is okay, but technology done together with partners who are fully engaged is really important.”
Nvidia has received some criticism from enthusiasts concerning the price of its RTX cards and the relative of lack of game support at present. Su indicated that building a development ecosystem was important.
Later, Su expanded on her thought.
“I don’t think we should say that we are ‘waiting,’” Su said, in response to this reporter’s question.
“We are deep in development, and that development is concurrent between hardware and software.”
“The consumer doesn’t see a lot of benefit today because the other parts of the ecosystem are not ready,” Su added. [iroboto: DirectML is not ready for instance]