Rumor: Only AMD Navi 2X flagship cards will support ray tracing

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Just yesterday, AMD confirmed the release of new Radeon graphics accelerators by the end of this year. In fact, it can be several separate lines of video cards with different GPUs, combined into a subgroup Navi 2X with the general architecture of the 2nd generation RDNA. Chinese enthusiast AquariusZi on the PTT.cc forums shed light on the likely composition of Navi 2X cores and their physical characteristics.

He mentioned three GPUs, the designation of which has already been seen repeatedly on the Internet: Navi 21 with an area of 505 mm², Navi 22 - 340 mm² and Navi 23 - 240 mm². According to an insider, the size of the GPU crystals is within ± 5 mm² of the indicated values. For comparison, the core area of Navi 10 in older Radeon RX 5000 graphics cards is 251 mm², and the area of Navi 14 (Radeon RX 5500 XT) is 158 mm².

AquariusZi also added that support for hardware acceleration of ray tracing will be peculiar only to the flagship Radeon with the Navi 21 processor. If this turns out to be true, then the chosen AMD strategy will resemble the differentiation of Nvidia Turing graphics chips into two families: GeForce RTX and GeForce GTX. In addition, do not forget that the Navi 2X will bring a 50% increase in performance per watt.

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