Gears 5 Developer mentions dedicated ray-tracing cores from AMD in next-gen XBox

Yeah, it's a bit of a long title, but really it covers it all. It's not a secret that the way forward for PC and console gaming is some level of Raytracing, preferably hardware side supported. While NVIDIA is pioneering this right now, DX Raytracing support will be a thing in future products.

AMD skipped a beat with the series 5700, but of course, AMD will support it in the future as well, as well, they have to. That said, the next Xbox currently codenamed Scarlett is likely to already support real-time raytracing (DXR). An interesting remark has been made by Colin Penty responsible for Gears 5, as he states there will be dedicated raytracing cores in that product. Of course, it is also possible to run DXR over the classic shader engine, but the performance hit would be huge. An extra co-processor or Raytracing cores likely is being embedded in Scarlett.

Penty said he is "definitely super excited" about the forthcoming release of Microsoft's next-generation console, Project Scarlett, in Holiday 2020.

"We don’t have anything to announce right now in terms of Gears with the new hardware--but I’m definitely super excited about what the new hardware could do. Having dedicated raytracing hardware is huge," he said.

AMD recently updated on the "Investor Presentation", a new presentation named showed roadmaps running up-to 2022. Mentioned is RDNA 2.