“Real-time ray tracing” are the latest and hottest buzzwords on the PC. And while NVIDIA users have been enjoying these effects, AMD claimed that all of its current DX12 graphics cards support ray tracing via Microsoft’s DXR fallback layer.

According to AMD themselves, their current stack does support the fallback layer. pic.twitter.com/qryLXjNKEi — coreteks (@coreteks) February 20, 2019

Now as you may know, only the RTX series is currently capable of running the real-time ray tracing effects in the latest games and that’s because AMD has not added support for the fallback layer on its drivers.

From what we know so far, the only GPU that supports Microsoft’s fallback layer is the NVIDIA Titan V, something that explains why this particular GPU was able to run Battlefield 5 (something we’ve covered in the past).

Performance, however, appears to be underwhelming via this “emulation/software” method. This could explain why AMD has not enabled the real-time ray tracing fallback layer on its drivers as its GPUs currently lack hardware components that could accelerate the ray tracing calculations.

In short, and while theoretically AMD’s DX12 GPUs can support real-time ray tracing, chances are we won’t see the red team adding support to it for the foreseeable future (or at least until AMD releases GPUs that are capable of running RT games with acceptable framerates).