"Our vision on gaming is very broad. We think about it across PCs, consoles, cloud and how we deliver content into all those pieces," said AMD CEO Lisa Su in a conversation with journalists at CES. "I think ray tracing is an important technology, it's something we're working on as well from both a hardware and software standpoint. I think the important thing, though -- and that's why we talk so much about the development community -- is that technology for technology's sake is OK, but technology done together with partners and really getting the development community fully engaged is really important."

Su says we'll be seeing more gaming talk from AMD this year and beyond. That's not too surprising, as we're expecting both Microsoft and Sony to start talking about their next-generation consoles soon. Those systems, which are expected to launch in 2020, will likely rely on AMD's custom graphics silicon, as we saw with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

"We view it as a broad ecosystem. We don't focus on just one technology; we need all this stuff to really come together," Su said. That's an understandable strategy for AMD. Even though NVIDIA has been talking about real-time ray tracing for the past year and just announced notebook RTX chips, there are still only a handful of games supporting that technology. And it didn't help that the RTX 2070 and 2080 were much more expensive than the previous generation's GPUs. (The recently announced RTX 2060 is its first "affordable" ray tracing card.) If you actually want consumers to see the value of ray tracing, it might make more sense to wait until there are games and plenty of developers using it first.